December 24, 2010

A continuing theme here at iSteve over the years has been the future of India.

As I first noticed back in 1981 when I was at UCLA, there sure are a lot of smart Indians in America. About a decade later, India's economic growth started to come more in line with that observation. By now, it is a cliche of spokesmen for the conventional wisdom, such as Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Thomas Friedman, that India itself is full of superstudents to whom America's lagging masses of youth must somehow try to catch up ... although what objective evidence that does exist suggests that eventuality has not fully gone through the formality of taking place yet. On the other other hand, evidence from places like Trinidad, South Africa, and Fiji suggests that pretty ordinary Indians do pretty well for themselves once they are free of Mother India.

To have a clue about India's future, it helps to know something about India's present and past. But that is inordinately complicated. Moreover, since Indians think about their society's human capital potential in terms of only partial exogenous extended families (i.e., racial groups, dozens and dozens of racial groups), Americans have a hard time grasping what they are talking about. All this Indian talk about race and IQ, well, if Americans didn't know that Indians are diverse and therefore, by definition, can't be racist, well, they just wouldn't know what to think.

A reader who calls himself Andy, writes to clear up matters about the intellectual structure of modern Indian life.

"Most of this information is passed through word of mouth from elders to youngsters and it would be hard to find this kind of detail in books. So enjoy!"

I'll put Andy's description of the different categories of South Asians and their rough IQ levels below the fold:

Rec1Man's (I cannot guess who he might be) model is fundamentally flawed. It is true that North experienced lot more slaughter of elites and lower classes than south, but it also led to more challenge and response (Toynbee), and in many parts of Northern India (mainly Rajasthan), self immolation to keep ethnic purity high was routinely performed if the natives lost against the invaders.

Marwaris (and Brahmins) also migrated a lot throughout India, founding large business empires (much like Jews spread in Europe). There is a deep resentment among Indians against Marwari and Brahmin success, and policies are enacted or pushed to shove these groups aside and make space for less "fortunate".

The gradation levels by Rec1man are also very rudimentary and do not go into enough detail. I want to fill in some details and you can add these to your model if you like, but do not mention my name (Jeez!) due to obvious reasons ... I also feel that his model might not achieve what it hopes, and a large scale IQ exam (at least 5 exams given over a period of one week to at least 1000-10,000 exam takers per caste/social/ethnic group) is the only way to solve the Indian Subcontinent IQ puzzle. I would say look at the results of IIT/AIIMS/IIM exams and sort by surnames for input data to use his model. For disclosure, my dad, uncles, many cousins all cracked the IITs or IIMs.

1. Muslim gradations: Muslims in India are not just Dalit and Non-Dalit, or forward and backward castes. It is a lot finer than that. Muslim gradations are as follows:

i) Sayyads: Sayyads are at the top of the pyramid. These are mainly mixtures of Prophet Mohammed's tribe's elite descendants, local Indian merchants, and elite Brahmins. Mohammed's tribe itself was of Merchant caste. Pakistani Dictator Pervez Musharraf's ancestors were Sayyads (sometimes spelled as Sayid, Sayed or Said) and his ancestral mansion is [not all that far from] my ancestral mansion in ... Delhi.

ii) Ashraf proper: These are mainly either Brahmin converts or descendants of Oghuz/Chagatai Turkic elite or some Persian Nobility who settled in India and mixed with other Brahmin converts. The richest Indian muslim, Azim Premji of Gujarat, owner of WIPRO IT giant is an Ashraf. Pakistan's Army Chief Ashfaq Kayani is also an Ashraf, his ancestry being from Persian Nobility.

iii) Mughals: These are rank and file Turkic soldier settlers, descendants of Turkic elite who mixed with local women irrespective of caste, or products of royal harems. Mughal elite used to impregnate thousands of women in their harems so there is a large population of Mughals in India.

iv) Pathans: These are Pashtun tribes from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia who joined their Oghuz or Chagatai Turkic superiors to subjugate India and became large landed nobility. However, they are at fourth level since they were/are considered barbarians, essentially muscle guys who had good fighting skills but not much else.

Most Bollywood stars are either Ashraf, Mughals or Pathans, and have light skin and hazel/green/occasionally blue eyes and are generally taller.

Nikki Haley of South Carolina is from a successful Jat community in India which is spread over Sikh (Punjab State), Hindu (Haryana State) and Muslim (Pakistani Punjab). There is intense rivalry between Sikh and Hindu Jats and that is a major reason why Indian Punjab was split into Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh during 1960s.

c) Arzal: These are the outcastes or Dalit Muslims who are at the lowest level and find very hard to mix with other muslims. They belong to the janitor, butcher, leather, and menial jobs occupations. They have the lowest IQs perhaps.

When Arzals and Azlafs either through gaining wealth, power or fame are able to mix with Ashrafs, they consider it a mark of success. Just like Blacks, who crave Germanic blondes, and feel socially superior when they successfully mix with them and have kids.

i) Saraswat Brahmins: They are at the top of the pyramid. These Brahmins originate between the extinct Saraswati river (recently its bed was identified through satelitte imagery) and the Ganges. This means they are primarily from the Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kashmir, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Extreme Western Uttar Pradesh and Pakistani Sindh. Nehru-Gandhi family are Saraswat brahmins (with a little parsi mix). Founder of Arya Samaj, the earliest Hindu nationalist organization was a Saraswat Brahmin from Gujarat state, which is India's most conservative and prosperous state.

Some of these Saraswat brahmins migrated south to peninsular India. Infosys, another Indian IT giant's top managment is almost all South Saraswat migrant brahmins.

ii) KanyaKubja brahmins: These are next in the pecking order and these originate mainly from India's largest and most populated state Uttar Pradesh, mainly around Ganges and Yamuna river. India's first Hindu Nationalist Prime Ministers, AB Vajpayee is a KanyaKubja Brahmin.

iv) Southern Brahmins: Many of these are actually the highest grade Saraswat brahmin migrants from North so its difficult to identify pure southern brahmins. These include Tamil brahmins (Noble laureates, CV Raman and S. Chandrasekhar etc) and fall broadly into Iyers or Iyengars. Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi is a Southern Brahmin.

There are other classifications of Brahmins, based on their lineage and priestly authority over the 4 Indian Vedas, the 4 books collectively like an Indian Bible. One Veda Lineage groups have their surnames as Vedi, 2 Veda lineage have higher rank and are called Dwi-vedi, 3 Vedas called Tri-vedi or Tri-pathi or Tiwari, and 4 Vedas called Chatur-Vedi.

But this is not very popular since the first Veda, called Rig Veda is considered the most ancient and divine and if a lineage belongs solely to Rig Veda, then those Brahmins have higher rank than most others. A mix of geographical and Veda lineage classification is more reliable according to Indian traditions.

Brahmins were 4.35% according to 1931 British census (includes India, Pak, Bang), but I suspect they are probably less than 4% now due to lower birth rates compared to lower castes.

2) Merchant Castes: They number about 15 million or 1.5% of India's population and their birth rates are even lower than Brahmins. Marwaris ~6.5-7 million are the more successful among them. Among these the Agrawals and Mittals are most numerous, ~5 million, Birlas and Maheshwaris are ~0.5 million, and others are perhaps ~1 million.

Marwaris rival the Parsis in wealth and IQ intensive professions. In fact Tatas (a leading Parsi family) and Birlas (a leading Marwari family) are considered the Rockefeller and Rothschilds of India. John Maynard Keynes wrote a book on Marwari/Parsi Business called "Indian currency and finance".

3) Samurai Caste: These are primarily the landed nobility from various parts of India, though over half of India's royal families originate from the desert state of Rajasthan. They are mostly the descendants of Scythians and local mixtures. Like Turks, they have a lot of vital intelligence but due to their reluctance to migrate into Quantitative, Math, Science professions, their mental IQ is perhaps not that high.

Kayasthas (Sub group among Samurais) are sometimes considered a mix of Samurai and Merchant class but occasionally they are considered at par with Brahmins.

India's Aishwarya Rai, the blue/green eyed Miss World is from the Samurai class who migrated to Southern India. Only 1-2 million from her caste are left, and her ancestors founded the Chola Naval Empire, which takes much credit for transmitting Indian culture and political system to Malay Archipelago.

4) Shudras: Peasant Castes, farmers, iron workers, low skill workers. These are spread more or less evenly throughout India and I don't have much to say any further.

5) Dalits or Outcastes: These are the most unfortunate, although they have made a lot of progress over last 3-4 decades.

Altogether if you put Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs all communities together from the Indian Subcontinent (1.6 Billion or 25% of Human race), there might be about 70-80 million who might have the median IQs between Shanghai and Japan. 5-6% of India's population.

Also 3 out of top 10 in your PISA chart are city, quasi city state, or city state, (Shanghai, Singapore, HK) so you have to account for that. Metro cities are typically high in IQ compared to regions/countries where IQ varies between cities, towns, rural areas, nether-world and under-world.

222 comments:

It seems suspicious that people who were promoted to the top of the hierarchy by accident (ie Mohammed's early followers) just happen to be the most materially successful.

It makes sense to imagine IQ correlating with earnings in Western countries which have had several generations of high social mobility. I don't think it's sensible to make that prediction about India, which has been a closed and nepotistic economy until very recently. No doubt some of the nouveau riche got that way through innate ability, but many may have simply reaped the rewards of family connections and luck. Give India several decades for social mobility to work, then take the measurements. (Straight-up IQ tests may be better, but in a country as poor as India it can also be affected by parents' economic status, via childhood nutrition.)

Sayyads: Sayyads are at the top of the pyramid. These are mainly mixtures of Prophet Mohammed's tribe's elite descendants, local Indian merchants, and elite Brahmins. Mohammed's tribe itself was of Merchant caste. Pakistani Dictator Pervez Musharraf's ancestors were Sayyads (sometimes spelled as Sayid, Sayed or Said) and his ancestral mansion is [not all that far from] my ancestral mansion in ... Delhi.

Fascinating. As I've said to rec1man before, this sort of stuff cries out for a book-length treatment. I know I'd buy a book like that and I'm not even Indian. There is a lot of curiosity about this out there.

Someone should check what percentage of the people who call themselves Mohammad's descendants actually descend from a single male-line ancestor who lived in his time period. This is definitely doable with current technology. I'd imagine that the incentive to falsely claim descent from Mohammad would have been huge over the centuries.

"Merchant Castes: They number about 15 million or 1.5% of India's population and their birth rates are even lower than Brahmins."

Why? The dysgenic aspect is depressing and a bit puzzling. Upper caste Indians are conservative enough to only marry within their castes, but not conservative enough to want to have large families? Why don't these two facets of conservatism go together?

I'm not knowledgeable to comment on all of this, but some of these assertions are laughably wrong. For instance, this: "Many of these are actually the highest grade Saraswat brahmin migrants from North so its difficult to identify pure southern brahmins."

It's true that there have been large Brahmin migrations to the south within historical time, and that South Asians can generally be resolved into caste groups by population genetic structure. (Xing, et al. 2009). But these migrations were definitely not recent, they might not have been very large compared to the pre-existing population, and it's not really possible to identify any subcommunity or set of individuals who's clearly of Saraswat (or other North Indian Brahmin) descent.

South Indian Brahmin populations actually differ considerably from Saraswat populations: they exhibit a distinct ancestral component modal in Dagestan, as Dienekes discovered recently, they're one of a very few number of South Asian groups that feature significant numbers of individuals in haplogroup G2a, etc.

As for where they fall on Andy's totem pole, it's hard to answer an assertion that's made without any real evidence. Factors complicating his ranking might include the fact that of the four people of Indian descent who've won Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences, three have been South Indian Brahmins (Iyers, specifically). André Weil also notes somewhere that virtually the entire faculty of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research was composed of Iyers or Iyengars, and perhaps a plurality of India's higher-rated grandmasters are South Indian Brahmins. But until we have good data, this is just handwaving.

I should note that that "Dagestani" component might actually be more significant in North Indian Brahmins, though those populations specifically (as opposed to North Indian populations generally) don't seem to be available anywhere.

I went to college with many Indians and they pull each other up, and open doors for each other, no matter how smart they are. For example, a Punjabi woman that went to college with me was nice but had a hard time grasping some of the classes that she had. I helped her many times with homework and papers that she had to write. Right after college she immediately landed a job with Google and worked in the BI department. She told me that she knew other Indians there who got her the job. She later moved to Yahoo, Pay Pal, and now works for Sears Holdings Corporation moving up the ladder with each move. From the LinkedIn recommendations that she has it seems that Indians have been the core of her bosses and her co-workers that knew her. I know other people who were in her class and in the same major, computer science, that weren't Indian and haven't managed to even get a good paying job yet. These people did better in school but didn't know anybody that could open doors for them.

I think India will be fine if the elite--smart people--are allowed to innovate and expand wealth, if there's a sizable enough thrifty middle class, and if the lower masses don't develop modern pathologies.

In pre-modern societies--and much of India is still pre-modern--, there's a lot of crazy and ugly things, but there is a sense of meaning and spirituality going back centuries or millennia. Dumb or ignorant people lean on these customs and values for some semblance of moral, social, and cultural order. The problem with modernization in many cases is it leads to breakdown of the old values without replacing them with new values. For educated people, loss of old 'superstitions' means the gain of new 'science' and rational truth. For smart people, loss of old privileges means opportunity to seek new riches. For the lower orders and the culturally impoverished, loss of old values and faiths means replacement with coca cola, drug use, family breakdown, etc. For dumb people, the new order means being left behind. Freedom is great if you're responsible and know how to use it, but freedom can be worse than lack of freedom if it means acting like the black underclass. Cuban blacks under police state controls act more sane than blacks in Detroit. And in some ways, Russians under communism acted less crazy than they are doing now.

The change from a world of old taboos to a world of new freedoms is often destabilizing. It's a great opportunity for some, a mass of confusion to others. Amidst these changes, three kinds of people fare better. Those with power, wealth, and connections. Those with high intelligence. Those with higher values/culture. Africa is a mess but those with connections stay above the fray. Mugabe and his close associates are still doing fine while masses starve. Same goes for the elite in Haiti. As for those with higher intelligence, they are simply better suited to navigate through the social upheaval--like the smarter organized criminals in Russia or the new merchant class in China since the 1980s.As for higher values, it is the most valuable asset to MOST PEOPLE in fast-changing society. Higher values have an element of timelessness and/or universality, and it's something for everyone. Jews had Judaism and Chinese had Confucianism. Judaism is for all Jews, rich and poor. Confucianism is also for all Chinese, rich and poor; it says all Chinese should aspire to knowledge and wisdom. It says society is like a family. Ideas like these are not restricted to one specific time or place. So, even through rapid change, they can serve as a cultural compass for a people. This cannot be said of American Indian culture; it may have nobility and beauty in its own world, but separated from its geography, flora, and fauna, it has little value. A Jew can worship his universal god anywhere. An American Indian who worships a particular hill and tree will be lost in a desert. And if the teachings of Confucius still has relevance to modern Chinese, American Indian folklore, colorful as it is, has little meaning in the modern setting.

There's often a problem in the meeting of modernity and backward peoples; backward people don't know what to do with freedom. It's like giving adult freedoms to an 8 yr old. For a child to grow into adulthood, he has to undergo a process of development where freedom is curtailed while being inculcated with discipline and responsibilty; freedom is promised but it is delayed; it is EARNED than ensured. If Germanic barbarians had suddenly come in contact with the modern world, they might have been corrupted by rampant freedom than have been imbued with deep cultural values rooted in spiritual and moral discipline(of Christianity). Of course, masses of whites today are being turned into a bunch of Jerry Springer, hip hop, Howard Stern listening idiots, so maybe freedom is killing us too, as we become less anchored to any united spiritual or moral order. Indeed, even Christianity is turning into dumb showbiz. For the elites, fading of old values means more freedom of thought. For the masses, it often means acting like barbaric lunatics. This is where Richard Dawkins gets it wrong. He seems to think that if we get rid of superstitious religions, everyone will be a rational and intelligent creature like him. But for most people, secular culture means rap music, tv shows, and freedom to have wild orgies.

There's another problem with modernity. Elites of old were often ruthless and murderous but they had the courage to impose order on the lower orders. So, the masses were instilled with some values and discipline. Working classes in old Britain may have been 'oppressed' but they also respected their superiors and aspired to be higher themselves. There was some sense of respect in their cultural outlook. Today, working classes are happy to be wild and crazy. If anything, British uppercrust seem to be into mass culture, african bongo beat, etc. Black middle class used to serve as the model for all blacks. Now, black middle class imitate ghetto culture. Wasp white middle class used to be the model for all Americans. Now, your average white middle class kid is into eminem. People used to go to college for higher learning. Now, it's to party, rock n roll, or take up radical politics of destruction. European elites are afraid to pressure Muslims to assimilate. In the US, we don't believe in immigrans and minorities 'melting' into the majority culture anymore. Instead, we are told that even saying 'merry christmas' is a form of white majority oppression of non-whites and non-Christians. Working class Briton says F YOU to the elites, and non-whites in Britain say F YOU to whites. Elites, no longer possessed of moral authority, pander to the masses, and whites similarly pander to non-whites. And we all suck up to gays.

This is probably why many East Asians have a certain fondness for authoritarianism. Singaporeans respect Mr. Lee. Japanese have never passionately embraced democracy. South Koreans, though democratic, seem to revere the memory of military dictator Park. And, It's not only the Chinese communist party but many many Chinese. It's not that they hate freedom but fear that freedom might turn the lower masses-and there are plenty in still poor China--into a bunch of permanently corrupt idiots like drunken Russians or American blacks. When the masses become morally corrupt, democracy and freedom cannot save them. ONLY a return to old authoritarianism can change their moral character.

When it comes to India, there are many variables. Hinduism is a higher religion but also a cluttered confusing mess. I don't know if it can serve as a positive value system for the masses in the modern or modernizing world. It lacks a democratic aspect of Judaism and Confucianism. Judaism and Confucianism are elitist in emphasizing knowledge, wisdom, and excellence, but there is one God for all Jews, and theoretically, even a Chinese peasant's son could take the imperial exam. But Hinduism developed as a system to perpetuate social rigidity and caste system. Different localites worship different gods, different castes and ethnic groups have different roles. Now, modern India has moved beyond old prejudicies, but this applies mainly to the westernized middle class. Many poor Indians are still illiterate or barely literate. Their sense of order and values still derives from Old Time Customs and Religion. If they can be brought UP into the new world, it'd be great. But what if modernity for these means loss of old certainties without the gain of new meanings and opportunities? What if the Drunken American Indian Syndrome comes into play? The sight of a drunken American Indian is more pathetic than the sight of an old Warrior Indian. An warrior brave may have been savage and cruel, but he had his pride, honor, and sense of meaning in the world. The drunken Indian, though part of the modern world, had no place either in the old(vanished)or the new(beyond comprehension).

It seems to me Hinduism, alone among great religions, developed solely for the purpose of maintaining a rigidly divided society. While all great religions have been used and abused by the elites to maintain their power and privilege, there was still a great emphasis on spiritual and moral unity. Judaism is for all Jews, Christianity is for all Christians, Islam for all Muslims, Buddhism is for all Buddhists, and Confucianism(a kind of spiritualized philosophy)is for all Chinese. There is strict hierarchy in Confucianism between man and wife, father and son, older brother and younger brother, but everyone's part of the same family, biologically or politically. One doesn't get this sense with Hinduism. And one wonders what can be done with Indian culture to promote values for a modern world. There has been a kind of mass Hinduism--turned into a nationalist ideology, with great contradictions. It offers all Hindus a sense of pride and unity, yet Hinduism, by its own very nature, says some are better than others. Lower caste Hindus embrace Hindu nationalism because it gives them a chance to assert themselves politically--at least in combatting non-Hindus and Muslims. But they are embracing an ideology that says they are lower than higher caste Hindus. They are seeking empowerment through a religion that has historically kept them down. Something similar happened in Japan when samurai militarism--which had been caste-oriented--was turned into a kind of national ideology for all Japanese. Sons of peasants, who'd been oppressed by samurai for centuries, became the most fanatical followers of the new order. I guess it's difficult to let go of the sacred. Both Hindu nationalism and Japanese militarism sought to maintain old hierarchies but appealed to the traditionally oppressed masses by promising them an important role in the movement. Though lower orders could never rise to the top, through their sheer devotion and maybe acts of violence against the enemy, they could earn a kind of sainthood.

Perhaps a good way to understand India is to look at Latin America. Though Latin America was invaded by Spanish and Portuguese(rather than by Aryans) and though the new official religion was Christianity, something like an Indian caste system developed and was practiced for centuries. Catholicism in Latin America, instead of serving to raised the masses of non-whites, was used to prop up a system of fear and superstition to keep them servile indefinitely. (Of course, lower natural IQs of natives also played a role.) They say Brazil is on the rise, and it certainly has lot more natural resources than India--it's more than 3 times the size of India, I believe. But the future of Brazil may be bleak because it has too many blacks. At any rate, the elites in Latin America, though white, seem not to be as energized as the elites in India or East Asia.On the other hand, maybe the middle and lower levels of Indian society are pretty much like the middle and lower levels of Latin America.

Is the main problem of Latin America it elites or its masses. Suppose a Latin American nation had an industrious German elite instead of a Spanish/Portuguese one. Might things be a lot better? After all, even in most advanced nations, MOST PEOPLE don't do anything really intelligent or special. Even the majority of college educated people do things that most people can do with training. Discipline and sense of values(and work ethic) matter more to the masses than special brain power. 99% of innovation--at least in science, technology, and medicine--come from the top. If the elites produce the new ideas and innovations, and if the masses have a culture of discipline and order(even if they aren't too bright), things may work out fine. Israel is a good example. Only 20% of Jews are of high IQ ashkenazi origin. There are many less intelligent sephardic Jews and lots of Arabs. But Israel proper does fine because ashkenazi Jews are good leaders, innovators, and managers and most sephardic Jews seem to be law-abiding schmoes. And most Christian Arabs seem to grudgingly accept the system as livable.

Americans are not encouraged to think about race in anything but the simplest and most stereotyped terms but I still think that educated Americans understand that Hindu India means racism more clearly than say German Nazism.

The Germans were lousy racists because they took to it so late and Jews are not really a race. They admired the Aryans who were of course the ancient invaders of India.

In the anti-racist tracts of the fifties I think it was Ruth Benedict who "proved" race wasn't real because the Indian caste system had failed to breed separate peoples after centuries of trying. Gandhi was seen as a crusader against racism rather like his subsequent intellectual disciple Martin Luther King.

The Hindu religion is often described as as an invention of the conquerors to justify keeping the vanquished down. This has become a political liability against Islam which for all its other faults is largely race tolerant (except for African blacks of course).

China with its history of civil service exams is the model for egalitarian policy while India with its caste system is the exactly the opposite - at least as a first approximation in the popular mind. Modern American liberals see China's greater success relative to India as as another lesson of the evils of race.

Kayasthas are usually considered closer cognitively and in other ways to Brahmins, so I'd lump them together with the Brahmins. Kayasthas have been comparatively quite successful in cognitively demanding fields , e.g. Satyendra Nath Bose, the person after whom the boson was named. Also Amartya Sen, one of India's few nobel laureates. Together with Brahmins, Parsees, Vaishyas they are quite definitely in the cognitive Indian elite.Most important Indian people come from these groups.

"Altogether if you put Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs all communities together from the Indian Subcontinent (1.6 Billion or 25% of Human race), there might be about 70-80 million who might have the median IQs between Shanghai and Japan. 5-6% of India's population. "

See, this is the problem with commenting on Indian IQ as of now. Given the huge diversity of races and ethnicities in India you will see a huge standard deviation. Because of this the actual size of the high IQ elite is uncertain. Furthermore, the environment in rural India is comparable to, if not worse than, subsaharan Africa. People are illiterate by the droves and of those who are literate, few are truly so and most have just the most rudimentary grasp of a language possible. I think you shall see a relative Flynn in India due to this. There's evidence that it's slowing down in some countries, developed ones, which means it's hitting a hard cap after which quite possibly development is meaningless for IQ.

Furthermore, I do not know of any studies in the past decade of Indian IQ. I don't have sources for IQ and global inequality but IQ and the wealth of Nations' sources are quite aged. It would not surprise me to see a small relative Flynn in India of 2010 compared to say, 1980.

Thus to conclude, a rise in the median IQ would probably happen with a rise in living conditions. IMO an accurate Median should be something in the 90s, 92-94. As I have said before there will be a huge standard deviation.

There is one factor that might change the IQ estimate, and that is the immigration of the Indian diaspora to India once the country gets itself going. Since the best and brightest minds of India are usually going abroad I would think this might raise the median IQ a little bit, but their small number will keep the rise insignifcant.

"Altogether if you put Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs all communities together from the Indian Subcontinent (1.6 Billion or 25% of Human race), there might be about 70-80 million who might have the median IQs between Shanghai and Japan. 5-6% of India's population. "

I have no idea how this is relevant in any way, shape or form to India's true IQ. Shanghai is a true international city and Japan is one of the richest nations per capita in the world. India's village facilities are subhuman. There is considerable noise due to extragenetic factors in comparing the two things.

If India gets modern facilities its median IQ will still be below the East Asian and White Mean, but not so much as to create such a small fraction of people capable of matching the elite East Asian median.

And to end, why restrict yourself to national medians ? India has limitless possibilities even with a lower median. The Brahmins quite possibly match the Ashkenazim in mean IQ and are in far greater number. Even with a median in the low 90s the overall SD for India will be huge due to those high IQ pockets leading to a healthy right tail of the curve. Who cares about the median if we can contribute high IQ elites by the dozen ?

Rec1Man's old estimate that Brahmans have average IQs higher than the Ashkenazi is absurd. Despite universal education in this group and no comparable history of oppression, they have few intellectual achievements in comparison to Ashkenazi, despite being about 3 times more numerous.

Also, Ashkenazi arose from a population with mean IQ of 97-100 to have mean IQ of 110-115. To do this they faced very strong IQ selection and several eugenic bottlenecks. The end result was they have IQs .7 to 1 SD higher than the local mean.

Hard to believe the Brahman, with no similar intense selective pressures, could have ended up with IQ of 115-120 as Rec1Man suggests, out of a population with IQ around 85-90.

While high-caste Indians certainly do well in the USA, they don't do near as well as Ashkenazi, educationally or economically, and are closer to NE asian immigrants in income, education, etc.

I think an estimate of IQ of 105-108 for US-based high-caste Indians and 95-100 for high-caste populations in India proper is a lot more reasonable.

My estimate is still about 1 SD above the Indian mean, and more than enough to allow these groups to dominate the economy.

To the average White Liberal, Indians (not the Tomahawk kind) are like Hispanics or Canadians. They exist, they're very important - but Liberals don't want to read about them.They'd rather talk about the Chinese or the Africans. I have no idea why.

In the 40s and 50s liberals used to care about India "it was cool". But at some point in the 1970s, India and Bangladesh became too normal or too Western. Same thing happened with Japan. For a while in the 50s, being interested in Zen and Japan was SWPL but once they became affluent and modern liberals lost interest.

Does anyone else feel the Liberal coverage of Japan has been hostile for the last 15-20 years? The Japs were OK when they were destroying the US auto industry, but now they seem like bigots who don't like immigration.

there's enough genetics via 23andme and the scholarship that we can quantify some of the assertions of the ancestry of muslims

- sayyad ancestry from the quraysh of arabia in india is almost certainly made up, and a signal of high status, not descent. almost everyone in eurasia could probably trace a line of descent to muhammad. but very few south asians show *arabian* genetic signatures. the only south asian muslim in 23andme who exhibits this that i know of is a guy whose grandmother was egyptian. anyone who disagrees with this is delusional or ignorant.

- the turkic ancestry is probably trivial. the only south asian muslims who show appreciable "eastern" ancestry are those from bengal, and that's austro-asiatic and tibeto-burman, not turk. granted, by the time that the turks arrived to south asia they'd have mixed with tajiks,but it is clear from akbar's physical appearance that he was of part mongolian provenance. intermarriage with rajputs and persians mean that his descendants looked persian or south asian (there are good paintings of the early mughals, you can observe their convergence to south asian appearance pretty clearly from akbar -> jehangir -> shah jahan, the last of whom was 3/4 rajput).

- the average recent contribution from west asia of north indian muslims is probably ~5%. recent as in post-1000 AD. there is naturally variance around that ~5%. i would bet it is mostly persian or turkicized tajik. if you to look for arab ancestry, you need to go to south indian coastal muslims.

instead of relying on legends and myths all south asians genuinely curious should get a 23andme kit before the price goes up on sunday and send it in to the dodecad project:

I personally know a lot of Indo-Fijians, whose ancestors migrated as poor laborers. My general impression is that Indo-Fijians are not especially intellectual and might be below the white IQ mean, but they don't strike me as being especially dull or slow people either. If you said that their mean IQ was somewhere in the low/mid 90s, I'd buy it.

Most Indo-Fijians are working to middle class, in this country and in Canada. They have a high home ownership rate and their kids seem to overwhelmingly graduate from high school, but may or may not attend college. Crime doesn't seem to be a major problem among them, but it's not nonexistent either.

Unlike Indian-Americans, however, most Indo-Fijian kids are not top of the class scholars that glide effortlessly into medicial, dental, and pharmacy school. A lot of them are just happy to see the kid graduate form college and get a middle class job somewhere. It's not like with IAs, where the parents are disappointed if the kid doesn't become a neurosurgeon at John Hopkins.

Indo-Fijians have pretty big ambitions in terms of business, their children's academic future, and life in general. They work hard, save money well, have a decent family structure, and do reasonably well at keeping out of big time trouble. I'd bet that when matched for IQ, they significantly outperform all other races, except Asians.

Industrious, risk-adverse, low testosterone, hungry to suceed, and submissive (to the family) are traits I'd associate with the Indo-Fijians. They have a very middle class mentality. That's probably why they can do better than IQ, by itself, would indicate.

One thing people don't appreciate is that making it into the working and middle classes isn't that hard in America, even for a low IQ person, due to the high availability of professional, entreprenuerial, and academic opportunities. So a reasonably diligent kid from Fiji or China, with a domineering family that pushes him a lot, can make it into the middle class pretty easily, even if he aint all that intellectually.

British Sikhs from rural Punjab are another example of commoner Indians that have done pretty well.

People generally think of nations as being high IQ (Europe, East Asia, Israel) or low IQ (everywhere else). India is probably somewhere in the middle. However, India likely has high variance in the IQ structure, due to assortive mating and the caste system. So India likely can produce a lot of smart people due to population size and high variance, even if the mean IQ is mediocre.

People think of Indians are superstudents because Indian kids are industrious, nose to the grindstone, and really hungry. Sure not all of them are smart enough to accomplish their goals, but they are some really ambitious kids and work damn hard. Almost every middle class person in India (ie those that can afford to educate their children) has a son that wants to be an engineer or computer specialist. Even if only 5 percent of them are pretty bright, that's still an enormous of amount of utilizable human capital. My guess is that Thomas Friedman has met many hungry and ambitious kids from their upper IQ segment of India's population.

People like to say that the India has a lot of people, so it can produce a lot of programmers and doctors, even if the mean IQ is 80. Those people ignore that likely 80-90 percent of the Indian population is so poor that they can't decently feed, clothe, and educate thir children. Imagine how much more competitive India will be when the masses see the opportunities that their upper class coethnics have.

If you look back at India's history, almost all of the population have been farmers, mainly of rice or wheat. That selects for industriousness, long term orientation, and strong families.

For India, I think a realistic model is Taiwan, but with a mean IQ about 1/2 of standard deviation lower. So a reasonably okay place, with large pockets of dynamic economic and technological activity, but not first world.

The FT reports that India's per capita income averages less than $1,000 per year. While its infrastructure is woefully inadequate and jobs are not being created either in mega cities or regional ones/rural places to handle the collapse of rural farming (into mechanized agriculture).

So, I think a bearish bet on India long term is probably smart. Its a thin grade of high IQ outsourcing spread over massive rural poverty and racial/ethnic/religious strife.

*Even assuming only 80 mil south asians have a median Shanghai IQ,thats more than enough for outsourcing to severely impact middle-class and upper-middle-class whites, since this segment is fluent in English.

*This higher IQ elite is almost entirely in India, since Pakistan and Bangladesh fare so poorly in International academic competitions such as Math Olympiad.

*The dividing line between North Indian and South Indian brahmins is the Narmada river in Gujurat.

*No more than 10% of South Indian brahmins are Saraswats.

*Razib had a post a few years ago, that of the top 100 IIT ranks, 17 were scored by Tamil Brahmins - non-Saraswat Iyers and Iyengars.

*3 ( out of 4 ) Indian science nobels have gone to non-Saraswat Iyers*Ramanujam was a non-Saraswat Iyengar*World Chess Champion , Vish Anand is a non-Saraswat Iyer.

*Infosys was started by a group of South Indian brahmins, not specifically Saraswat.Narayamurthy - Madhwa non-Saraswat,Nilekani - SaraswatKris Gopalakrishnan - Iyer non-SaraswatRaghavan - Iyengar non-Saraswat.

*Once you know someones caste, you can mostly predict their IQ.

*Marwaris are very jewish in nature, ruthless shylock type money lenders and often mix lard into vegetable oil to make a few more pennies. Whereas the Parsee Tatas have a reputation for being good corporate citizens.

*Among the middle and lower castes, there are a fair amount of skilled artisan castes who have not yet received full access to education and I expect many of them to score well in IQ.

*Jat Sikhs - Nikki Haley - are famous for being dumb and if a Jat Sikh can outshine most of the whites in NC, it does reflect poorly on NC

*In the recent National Merit Semifinalists, in most states, Indians took about 6% of the slots, and of this 6%, 5% were upper castes ( 50% of US diaspora blend ) and only 1% were mid-level castes like patels and Jat sikhs. ( the other 50% of the US Indian diaspora )

*Second generation US Indians have a college rate of 65% ( 50% upper caste, 50% middle caste ) after regression to mean.

*In Bihar, there is a program called Super 30, run by a brahmin teacher. Thousands of poor middle and lower caste kids are given 3 layers of screening of IQ tests and the top 30 are trained for IIT exam and all of them pass it.Whereas almost no blacks get into Caltech

This is all well and good, and even a tad edifying-- but rather anecdotal. I suggest studying regression to the mean amongst Indian-Americans in order to verify whether an IQ of 85 for India is a good figure. By the way, a similar argument may be made with respect to mizrahi/ Sephardic Jews. They average 92 in Israel according to available data, but are quite a heterogeneous group. The largest diaspora within are Moroccan Jews ( by far the largest mizrahi diaspora), and are widely considered to make up a big slice of israel's working class. The Yemenite Jews have an even lower IQ ( being frighteningly close to the horn of Africa). On top you'll probably find the Iraqi and Syrian Jews. Both Iraq and Syria average the highest iq scores (87) in the middle east outside of israel-- despite both countries being among the least fortunate in terms of governance. I suspect the Jews from these countries average a stdv above that figure-- about 100, if not more.

Caste doesn't matter as much as people think, as Indian-Americans from all the castes seem to be doing comparatively well.

The main distinction is between the less educated Indian-Americans and the better educated (ie more select) Indian-Americans. The former do alright, but aren't especially smart, but the latter do very well and are bright.

I think among Indians, there's been a much higher degree of cognitive stratification, even within castes. This might be a product of Indians strongly preferring their children marry other people of a similar social/educational status, which goes a long way to creating an IQ overclass.

For a lot of Indian-American families, it can be said that they're decently bright, but very desirous of a good job and comofortable life, and willing to work/sacrifice to achieve that. They also can compell all the members to work the jobs, choose the careers, and marry the people who most advance the family's well being and wealth/prestige, which is important. Which is sort of why even lower IQ Indians do alright in places like Toronto and Vancouver BC, even if are somewhat lower in the economic and social ladder than IAs and slightly lower than whites.

Trinidad has decent PISA scores. If you just look at the Indian population, they likely are scoring in the mid 400s, which is not at all bad.

Perhaps a good way to understand India is to look at Latin America. Though Latin America was invaded by Spanish and Portuguese(rather than by Aryans) and though the new official religion was Christianity, something like an Indian caste system developed and was practiced for centuries.

Well, the Iberians and Aryans are related if you go back far enough... perhaps it's an instinctual way of dealing with lower-IQ races.

Is the main problem of Latin America it elites or its masses. Suppose a Latin American nation had an industrious German elite instead of a Spanish/Portuguese one. Might things be a lot better?

Look at Apartheid South Africa. In other words, probably, at least until the Germanic elite is talked into giving up its power.

A couple of commentors have asked about Anglo Indians. It's my understanding that upper caste Indins typically didn not marry/have children with the British, Portuguese or other Europeans. Is that correct?

And I'm not sure how they or Christian Indians in general fit into the social hierarchy in the nation.

"No doubt some of the nouveau riche got that way through innate ability, but many may have simply reaped the rewards of family connections and luck."

The fact that somebody in a family had acquired the ability to bestow such rewards at some point in the past says something good about that family's talents. Idiots can lose all sorts of advantages in a single generation in any system. Royal dynasties have fallen and rich have become poor in every country in every period. In pre-modern, traditional societies the struggles for power tended to be violent, so it probably took more effort, not less, to stay on top, than it does now.

I think you overestimate the degree of social rigidity in pre-modern societies.

In India, the tech capital is in Bangalore/Hyderabad in the predominately Dravidian southern part of the country. The south is more literate and prosperous than the north, where Aryan ancestry is higher.

Upper castes, for the most part, look like lower castes. Neither high nor low castes are caucasian, in the European sense.

The most Aryan looking people are actually in Pakistan, which is worse off than India. They also are in Kashmir, which is poor, and Punjab, which is a mediocre state by the standards of India. Even then, the Aryan looking Indians are still pretty dark.

There is no relationship between wealth and caucasian ancestry in India. Just ask Razib.

Latin Americans are not much like Indians. In India, the darkest skinnned people in the south are generally the biggest brainiacs. The northerners might consider themselves better looking, but there's no doubt who runs the software industry.

To the extent that people in India vary in skin color, occupation and climate are the big factors. For Indians in America, all the castes look the same, but the southies are darker than northies. Otherwise, it's tough to tell an Indian's ancestry.

"Currently I think the effective population of India for producing elite brainpower (i.e., comparing to a reference population with average IQ = 100 and access to first world education and training) is roughly 100 million. For China this number might be 300+ million, but we don't feel their presence in the West as strongly because of language barriers and because of the ability of the Chinese economy to absorb many of the high achievers domestically. (Despite all the Chinese scientists and engineers emigrating to the West there are just as many staying at home to develop a continent-sized economy with a space program, high speed trains, tech and defense industry, etc.)"

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/iit-uber-alles.html

"I recently came across this interesting web site maintained by Kamal Sinha, an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Bombay alum who has worked at Mitsubishi in Japan and in Silicon Valley.

It has been widely claimed (e.g., CBS Sixty Minutes) that IITs are the most selective universities in the world -- each year about 300k applicants compete for about 4000 spots. To enter the most competitive (e.g., EECS) departments, applicants must score amongst the top few hundred! I know several theoretical physicists in the US who were "toppers" on the IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Exam), including one who placed first in all of India his year ("first ranker")! Perhaps ironically, the first ranker didn't attend IIT -- he chose Caltech instead.

Despite the hype (see below) Sinha seems to think IIT is roughly comparable to other elite national universities like University of Tokyo, Seoul National University or Taiwan National University. Note he estimates the effective population base (the number of people who have access to first world educational resources in K-12) of India as only comparable to that of Japan (about 125 million; see here for a similar estimate by a well-known physicist). The estimates that lead to the conclusion that IIT is the most competitive in the world usually normalize to the entire Indian population of nearly 1 billion. I would say that China's effective population (in this sense) is around 200-300 million people (and growing rapidly), so perhaps Beida (Beijing University) and Tsinghua are the most competitive universities in the world."

Dagestan is in the north Caucasus. An important North Caucasus group (the Ossetians) speak an Iranian language. Obviously, one would expect Brahmins to be related to ancient Indo-Iranians. However, Ossetians aren't really in Dagestan. Moreover, Dagestan is a collection of more than a dozen small ethnicities - it's a hodgepodge, a catch-all name for a lot of different peoples. As all such catchalls the word "Dagestani" doesn't mean very much.

"In pre-modern societies--and much of India is still pre-modern--, there's a lot of crazy and ugly things, but there is a sense of meaning and spirituality going back centuries or millennia. Dumb or ignorant people lean on these customs and values for some semblance of moral, social, and cultural order."

There is an implication in all such sentiments that it's the dumb people who are most hurt by modernity. But actually they're almost the only ones who tend to breed in modern societies. The elites are screwed by modernity in the most profound, existential way (they go extinct because of low birth rates), while the bottom trudges along.

"For educated people, loss of old 'superstitions' means the gain of new 'science' and rational truth."

You forgot childlessness.

"I went to college with many Indians and they pull each other up, and open doors for each other, no matter how smart they are."

Yes, I've seen that too. In every case that I've seen they were pulling up not just any sort of Indians, but their own particular kind.

"It's not that they hate freedom but fear that freedom might turn the lower masses-and there are plenty in still poor China--into a bunch of permanently corrupt idiots..."

I don't buy the idea that the modern West is a big champion of freedom. It's just propaganda. Is the percentage of the Chinese population that's in jail for saying taboo things really greater than the percentage of the European population that's in jail for saying things that are taboo in Europe? I don't know. Freedom is the ability to pursue self-interest. In a lot of important ways self-interest is represented by ethnocentrism. Well, if you're a member of the majority, I don't think the Chinese or the North Korean state will ever put you in jail for ethnocentrism. In Europe they might.

"It seems to me Hinduism, alone among great religions, developed solely for the purpose of maintaining a rigidly divided society."

One can look at that differently: Hinduism doesn't lie as much as the other great religions. There never was and never will be any equality in nature. Why not simply acknowledge that truth? Hinduism does.

"Both Hindu nationalism and Japanese militarism sought to maintain old hierarchies ..."

They honestly acknowledged the existence of old hierarchies. The modern PC approach is to try to replace those with new hierarchies, while lying about one's love for equality, sometimes even refusing to acknowledge that the new hierarchies are hierarchies.

"Catholicism in Latin America, instead of serving to raised the masses of non-whites, was used to prop up a system of fear and superstition to keep them servile indefinitely."

Social class mostly reflects ability. Science isn't really aware of any ways to raise ability among the lower classes to the point where everyone is equal. Inequality is the way of the world (not just among people). Equality is a creature of dreams and demagogues' speeches. What are you blaming the Catholic Church for again, not being able to orchestrate the miracle of curing inequality? No one else can do that either.

Denis Evans, Have you ever actually lived in Britain? From the contents of your comment I have the hardest time believing that you'ce ever set foot here. You only have the most 'cartoon' understanding of British life, for example you seem completely ignorant of the fact that Britain is THE home of class warfare and class hatred.

Upper caste Indians are conservative enough to only marry within their castes, but not conservative enough to want to have large families? Why don't these two facets of conservatism go together?

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't see either of these particularly on a traditional or conservative metric, but rather as the behaviour of the masses rather than the behaviour of the elite.

I think there's a theory whereby people, at least in some rich cultures, tend to be driven to have children by status signalling, where the success of their children rather than their number is important, and obviously as there isn't a lot of nepotism to go around and as children cost a lot, it might be harder to raise large broods of successful children for no additional return on status.

If there is no disaggregated data by caste, do we actually have any standard deviation data for India as a whole on any SATs?

If it's higher than, say, China when aggregated, we'd have some more support for the line of reasoning that India has many subpopulations which differ strongly in intelligence, whereas if it isn't, we wouldn't.

It's also interesting that in spite of converting to Islam, they continued to maintain their cast identification. I wonder if that's also the case with Indian Christians. If that's the case, then that means, Hinduism as a religion contains cultural aspects that cannot be shaken off just by joining another religion.

Any IQ studies on Sri Lanka? Sri Lanka is India sans the crippling poverty, mass illiteracy and overpopulation. With better beaches and a more egalitarian social structure with Buddhism as the predominant religion.

I bet on Sri Lanka becoming developed long before India. All the vital stats are there: Low fertility rate (at 1.9 now - below replacement level) + 95% + literacy rate + decent infrastructure + relatively small population + excellent geography and location. Now with the civil war over, Sri Lanka looks to be taking-off as a local economic powerhouse (8%+ growth rates, Colombo Stock Exchange top-performer in 2009.)

Other, smaller, "brown" Asian countries seem to be outperforming India - in terms of the middle-class/upper-class standard of living, that is.

I was in India last month. Madras/Chennai. Awful place. They've filled the town with american interstate-style flyovers and overpasses and other such feats of 20th century civil engineering. Unfortunately the majority of the vehicles using such constructs are bullock carts, "autos", and bicycles. What's worse are the water problems that everyone's having now (goes from August to October I'm told) - not even the wealthy Brahmin households were immune from it. And hygiene is such a big concern for *everyone* - including the locals who live there. Certain restaurants to be avoided, etc. Advising people to stick to vegetarian when you eat out in case "something's wrong with the meat".

On the other hand, Colombo, just an hour away by plane, has almost completed its imitation of Singapore. There are supermarkets and malls, Pizza Huts and HSBC's, on every corner. The household I was staying at was getting DSL installed the next week - 2 megabit downstream too, a whole 512kbits faster than me in Tronno! While in Madras the "Maruti" reined supreme despite most major global automakers marketing at least one car in India, in Colombo the Corolla is the vehicle of choice. Indeed, you could also find Volvos, Beemers, even a MINI Cooper (!). There were also some Nissan models you don't find in North America - I suspect those are the ones marketed under the Infiniti label over here. I don't know where all the wealth is coming from, but its certainly getting there.

The difference between both towns, both of them large metros, was astounding to me. Statistically, however, it seems that Sri Lanka is just a poor Asian country known primarily for that oft-mentioned terrorist/separatist problem (the media reports make it sound worse than Nepal) while India seems like the place to be these days! Dost mine eyes decieveth me?

Wow! This seems highly speculative but quite possibly bang on target; definitely a step beyond what rec1man had proposed earlier. Its just incomplete as it leaves out some endogamous groups that are not explicitly mentioned. Thats not surprising as there are far too many of these in India. We need more from your correspondent.

@Anon said - Caste doesn't matter as much as people think, as Indian-Americans from all the castes seem to be doing comparatively well.--

Economically per 2009 US Census Survey, Median income for Indian Americans is $91K, vs $51K for Whites and $70K for chinese.And I bet the median Indian income is beyond the Jewish Ashkenazi Median Income.

However if you look at the National Merit Semifinalist list, 85% of Indian American semifinalists are upper castes like Brahmins and Merchants, who only form 50% of the US Indian diaspora. The other 50%% of the Diaspora consists of mid-level castes like Sikhs and Patels who while having high income, lack the IQ to win many National Merit Finalists.

Wow. India is really really complex. The indians I went to school with only mixed with their own, jews and asians, with many incredibly brilliant in verbal, math, science skills whatever. Complex personalities too -- not introverts, many with EQ and high IQ. All pursued graduate degrees at the finest institutions. However, when visiting India, came back completely unimpressed with the dolts there at every level. Is it massive brain drain, Steve?

The caste rules ban pre-marital sex and we have no unwed mothers this makes it easy to escape poverty in the west.

The DNA screen shots at Razib, show that South Indian Brahmins have the identical gene blend as Gujurati Patels , but there is a huge IQ difference, due to Brahmins have a selection filter for IQ each generation

Just like Blacks, who crave Germanic blondes, and feel socially superior when they successfully mix with them and have kids.

Do not the males of most (if not all) human races predominately prefer females with Germanic/Nordic phenotypes? Why should black males be any different? Perhaps attraction for lighter feminine features is a universal human male trait, like women's general preference for height.

Imagine a statement that reads, "...just like black women, who crave taller men, and feel socially superior when they successfully mix with them and have kids." Could such a statement apply to women of any race and ethnicity?

@Bruce Banner - Khatri Sikhs will be at the 5th percentile from top, Jat Sikhs will be 40th percentile from top.

Jains will be around 3rd percentile from top

Anglo-Indians - the fact is I went to school with many of them and uniformly they were academically mediocre.

They were much below brahmins and if I could generalise, I would say that they came in around the same level as Jat Sikhs, around the 40th percentile.

So white blood did not help the Anglo-Indians - no better than Jat Sikhs and very similar to Jat Sikhs, all brawn and no brain. The one difference with Jat sikhs was that the Anglo-Indians were sexually promiscous like white women.

Tribals and Muslims and Untouchables will be between the 60th percentile and 100th percentile from the top.

@Anon wrote - Upper caste Indians are conservative enough to only marry within their castes, but not conservative enough to want to have large families? Why don't these two facets of conservatism go together?--

Upper caste Indians are heavily westernised, and this leads to over-educated, career oriented hermaphroditic women who are under-breeders.

Upper caste Indians are more flexible in sub-caste marriages, whereas lower castes are more rigid against marrying out of their sub-castes and they do have larger families

Muslims outbreed even lower castes since they plan on demographic takeover.

@Denis Evans - the caste rules specifically ban criminality and unwed mothers- this means that even poor untouchable and tribal areas are not crime prone and mugging is unheard of, except in muslim locales where it is pious to steal from the infidel.

Lower caste Fiji and Caribbean Indians dont have unwed mothers and criminality and hence are able to do well in the west.

@Michael Vick,My father's chauffer, with only 10th grade education, a lower caste beneficiary of affirmative action quotas has put his 2 kids into Engineering college. And they seem to be passsing their courses.

Affirmative action may get them into Engineering college, but that wont give them an Engineering degree, they still have to pass the courses, and that requires a minimum IQ of 105

India is an absolute basket case. I've been to a large number of third world countries and India is the only one that shocked me.I had the best possible view of the country:staying in expensive, marble floored private homes, VIP treatment everywhere and I have zero desire to go near the country again. I now understand the many Indian immigrants I have met who refuse to visit their home country.I would hazard a guess that the majority of smart Indians live outside the country. There is little evidence of intelligence anywhere in India. How long and how far outsourcing will work there is still an open question despite the settled nature of the debate surrounding it. I met medical outsourcing personnel when I was there who processed US lab tests. They laughed about sending back random results to skin tissue samples etc when I got them drunk.Indians in India are used to work behavior that has never been acceptable in the West. Training them to Western standards will take decades and a cultural shift. Anyone that needs to get a clue about India should take a drive around a major city at 8:30 to 9:00 in the morning. The streets are virtually deserted by Indian standards. A country that doesn't get up until the sun is high in the sky is not going anywhere.

@Bob What are the achievements of Jews prior to 1850 - noneWhat are the achievements of non-Ashkenazi jews post 1850 - noneAshkenazi achievement is post 1850 or even post 1900.Entire south east asia, was peacefully civilized from India,and took up Indian alphabets peacefully, Tagalog in Philipines is written in Indian alphabetentire east asia took up Indian religion peacefully. The Buddha was not oriental, he was an Indian.

The US jewish college rate is 59%( pew report 2008 )Second generation Indians ( 50% Middle castes, 50% upper castes ) have a second generation college rate of 65%, after regression to mean.For a brahmin who can afford it, ( all do in the USA ), the only reason not to attend college is mental retardation.

In the brahmin arranged marriage system, non-college graduates are automatically eliminated for brahmins. and even in India, 40% of brahmins have a college degree.

Every generation in the arranged marriage system, there is a virtual IQ screen for brahmins- Sorting by educational qualification is done . No college degree = No wifeNo job = No wifeDumb brahmins go extinct.

Per Arthur Hu, 2002 data,for SAT scores, second generation after regression to mean.

SAT score for jews = 1150SAT score for Hindus = 1110Hindus consist of 50% mid-castes like Patel and Sikhs who score at white SAT levels of 1020, and the rest consist of 50% upper castes.

Upper caste SAT = ( 1110 - 0.5*1020 ) / 0.5 = 1200

Upper caste SAT outscores jews.

Of these 50% upper castes, just 20% are brahmins.

I bet that if a further slicing and dicing is done, Stand Alone Brahmin SAT scores will be another 50 points higher in the 1250 range.

The only 12 year old to score a perfect 1600 SAT, is not a jew, but a brahmin Iyer, Vinodhini Vasudevan.

I encourage everyone to mess around with this site for doing comparisons of various religious groups in the US ...a cross section you hear about a lot less than racial groups, though as Hinduism shows, race and religion are linked.

http://religions.pewforum.org/portraits

Jason Richwine has the first serious estimate of Indian American IQ here, from reverse digit span, and pegs it at 112.

> Does anyone else feel the Liberal coverage of Japan has been hostile for the last 15-20 years? The Japs were OK when they were destroying the US auto industry, but now they seem like bigots who don't like immigration.

Interesting observation. Would agree that recent coverage of Japan is negative on immigration, but the overall tone is not the same full court press that they have against China. It's more desultory, Japan is not the whole ballgame and is mostly escaping the tender ministration of the New York Times for now.

But regarding the auto industry thing, would disagree a bit on that. Reagan's dictum about government is worth remembering here:

if it moves, tax itif it keeps moving, regulate itand if it stops moving, subsidize it

This is how a liberal thinks as well. When India or Japan were down on their luck, then his "compassion" was seemingly boundless and he was all set to give foreign aid.

Of course, no country ever got rich off foreign aid. It's the whole teach a man to fish thing -- it's not just the relative ratio of investment to aid is > 10000:1, but also the fact that investment builds local capacity and aid outcompetes it.

Once India started actually competing with the West, even though it's still a poor country, suddenly the leftist's tone changed and he began going on about outsourcing and Benedict Arnold CEOs.

> I suggest studying regression to the mean amongst Indian-Americans in order to verify whether an IQ of 85 for India is a good figure.

Jason Richwine has some good numbers, but if you look at Indian American youth achievement a mean IQ of 85 doesn't pass the smell test.

More seriously, the "regression to the mean of 85" concept would only apply for a unimodal population. In a multimodal population all bets are off, and if you know anything about quantitative genetics it is obvious that India has an underlying demography that makes multimodality a foregone conclusion.

(In short, India is not one large random mating population, to vastly understate the matter.)

As an Indian-American, I have less knowledge of the various ethnic groups in India; there are only 4-5 major groups among Indian-Americans. I do, however, want to chime in on some misconceptions I see here as a result of rec1man's generalizations. I often see comments to the effect of successful "asians" being Chinese or Brahmins, and by "Brahmins", the commenter usually means successful InAms, as if the majority of successful InAms are Brahmins. That's not the case.

My guess, based on anecdotal data only, is that about half of InAms are Gujaratis, and the vast, vast majority are not Brahmins, but rather traditionally merchants. I'm a partner in a medical practice of about 35 total partners. Of these, four are Gujaratis (3 Patels + 1 Shah) and one is Bengali (Roy). I think Roy might be a Brahmin, but the rest of us aren't, and there are no South Indians among us.

Among the first-cousins on both sides of my mostly non-professional aunts/uncles family are doctors, engineers, and pharmacists. The least successful cousin is... well, I don't know what exactly she is anymore, but she bought a bunch of houses at the bubble peak and had them foreclosed. She'll still end up solidly middle class. These should be the population rec1man thinks are as smart as white blue-collar workers, but they are solidly white-collar professionals, most of whom are making >$100K/year.

Another generalization that does not fit my observations is the idea that South Indians are smarter / more successful than North Indians. In the cohort of about 50 InAm kids I knew and grew up with, if anything, the North Indians are more successful. Similarly, among the adult InAms I meet, there doesn't seem to be a whole of difference.

Having said that, I'm willing to believe that Tamil Brahmins might be smarter than everyone else simply based on the Nobel Prizes and success in Intel/Westinghouse prizes, i.e., the very right side of the tail. So they might be super-duper smart. But among the merely smart, I don't see generic South Indians being smarter than generic North Indians, at least among InAms.

When we're talking about a selection bias among InAms being the reason for InAm success, it's not Brahmins that are the core; there aren't enough of them to make up the core. It's the generic merchant castes that make up the bulk of successful Indian Americans.

One thing that stands out among what "Andy" wrote: the most prosperous state in India is Gujarat - mostly non-Brahmin merchants... vegetarian, conservative, family-oriented, temple-going people...who make up the largest portion of Indian Americans.

"Well, the Iberians and Aryans are related if you go back far enough... perhaps it's an instinctual way of dealing with lower-IQ races."

Yes they are related but the Aryans who invaded India were probably much closer to Slavs.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Distribution_Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.svg/400px-Distribution_Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.svg.png

Sailer contradicts himself with talk about Indian "races." He himself endorses cavalli-Sforza's 6 race model in which Indians are all lumped together as "Indo-European". So how come now Sailer finds all these Indian "races"?Here's what Sailer said a while back:

quotes:

"C-S's genetic diagrams point to a reasonably coherent 5 or 6 race model: Indo-Europeans (Caucasians); sub-Saharan Africans; Amerindians (related to Asians of course); Papuan/Australians; and East Asians, who can either be thought of as one race or as two divided into Northeast Asians and Southeast Asians."

Sailer also said:"C-S likes to say there is far more differentiation within groups than between groups. Of course, in reality it all depends on which trait you are talking about. Consider the job of identifying individuals for police investigations. Fingerprint variation is largely individual, skull shape is a mixture of individual and racial, while the general appearance of a living person (the gestalt of skin color, hair, facial features, etc.) is largely racial."

But notice how Sailer contradicts himself again. How do you tell different "races" when say among a batch of dark-skinned, narrow featured Indians, all with black hair - not uncommon scenario in India? So tell how this magical "race detection meter" would work?

Denis Evan says:Freedom is great if you're responsible and know how to use it, but freedom can be worse than lack of freedom if it means acting like the black underclass. Cuban blacks under police state controls act more sane than blacks in Detroit.

What a bunch of nonsense as applied to "blacks" in isolation while carefully skipping over white behavior. For example, White Germans were "kept sane" by one Corporal Schikelgruber but they perpetrated the most murderous genocide the world has ever known. White Irish had no police state in the US, but their crime rates int he 19th century were equal to or exceed black crime rates of today (Sowell 1981). So spare us yet another dubious "race" comparison unless you are willing to put it all on the table.

Sailer said:Moreover, since Indians think about their society's human capital potential in terms of only partial exogenous extended families (i.e., racial groups, dozens and dozens of racial groups), Americans have a hard time grasping what they are talking about. All this Indian talk about race and IQ, well, if Americans didn't know that Indians are diverse and therefore, by definition, can't be racist, well, they just wouldn't know what to think.

Sailer contradicts himself with talk about Indian "races." He himself endorses cavalli-Sforza's 6 race model in which Indians are all lumped together as "Indo-European". So how come now Sailer finds all these Indian "races"?Here's what Sailer said a while back: http://www.isteve.com/amazon-book-reviews-hbd.htm#L.L.%20Cavalli-Sforza%20--%20The%20Great%20Human%20Diasporas%20:%20The%20History%20of%20Diversity%20and%20Evolution

quotes:

"C-S's genetic diagrams point to a reasonably coherent 5 or 6 race model: Indo-Europeans (Caucasians); sub-Saharan Africans; Amerindians (related to Asians of course); Papuan/Australians; and East Asians, who can either be thought of as one race or as two divided into Northeast Asians and Southeast Asians."

Sailer also said:"C-S likes to say there is far more differentiation within groups than between groups. Of course, in reality it all depends on which trait you are talking about. Consider the job of identifying individuals for police investigations. Fingerprint variation is largely individual, skull shape is a mixture of individual and racial, while the general appearance of a living person (the gestalt of skin color, hair, facial features, etc.) is largely racial."

But notice how Sailer contradicts himself again. How do you tell different "races" when say among a batch of dark-skinned, narrow featured Indians, all with black hair - not uncommon scenario in India? So tell how this magical "race detection meter" would work?

Denis Evan says:Freedom is great if you're responsible and know how to use it, but freedom can be worse than lack of freedom if it means acting like the black underclass. Cuban blacks under police state controls act more sane than blacks in Detroit.

What a bunch of nonsense as applied to "blacks" in isolation while carefully skipping over white behavior. For example, White Germans were "kept sane" by one Corporal Schikelgruber but they perpetrated the most murderous genocide the world has ever known. White Irish had no police state in the US, but their crime rates int he 19th century were equal to or exceed black crime rates of today (Sowell 1981). So spare us yet another dubious "race" comparison unless you are willing to put it all on the table.

Anon wrote - A couple of commentors have asked about Anglo Indians. It's my understanding that upper caste Indins typically didn not marry/have children with the British, Portuguese or other Europeans. Is that correct?

And I'm not sure how they or Christian Indians in general fit into the social hierarchy in the nation.--

Indian Christians have caste90% of the bishops are upper caste and 90% of the laity is Untouchable and tribal and there are frequent caste clashes between xtians of different castes.

This technically meant that non-Hindus were untouchables, and the Sanskrit word for that is Mlecha which means 'foreign barbarian' and was used on Muslims, Indian christians and white christians.

Historically say 50 years ago, the touch of an Untouchable whether a Pariah or a Mlecha, required a purifying bath.

This led to problems in that the various puppet Maharajas often had to shake hands with English Kings or Viceroys. So these Maharajas wore gloves to prevent direct contact of their skin with a European and thus avoided a purificatory bath.

From a caste viewpoint, marrying a Muslim or a Christian ( brown or white ) would lead to expulsion and the Anglo-Indians were also Mlecha.

This meant that virtually no upper caste would marry his daughter to a European

Yes they are related but the Aryans who invaded India were probably much closer to Slavs.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Distribution_Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.svg/400px-Distribution_Haplogroup_R1a_Y-DNA.svg.png--

Above URL, at wiki also shows that R1A dates for Indians are between 16000 to 12000 years ago, whereas the slavic R1A dates are 11000 - 8000 years ago.

Indians don't have much premarital sex because they have a risk-averse personality type and a low level of testerone. When this is combined with the strictness of the Indian family, there is not much opportunity for sex outside of marriage.

2nd generation Indian-Americans have sex outside of marriage once they get to college (and get away from mommy and daddy), but they tend to be careful (ie birth control) and are monogamous. They also have the same low level of testosterone and risk averseness of the first generation.

Indian men are the ultimate beta males - monogamous, grinds, low testosterone, bad at sports, non-muscular, non-violent, thrifty, long-term oriented, family oriented, boring, and highly averse to risk. In many ways, Indians are just like East Asians. Perhaps India's mean IQ is not high, but Indian people are not like NAMs in their behavior or culture.

Yeah, I know a ton of Patels that are engineers, doctors, and dentists. My cousin was looking at all his Patel college friends on Facebook and he found that 10-15percent of them were in medical school. An equal percentage were in pharmacy school or dental. Smaller numbers were in law or engineering or MBA programs.

Pretty amazing, when you think that most Patel parents are not professionals, though most do have college degrees from lower end universites. I suppose Patels are an above average example of India, in wealth and education, but they aren't geniuses by the country's standards.

The Patel's success is a result of their grind work ethic, strong drive for wealth and education, willingness to sacrifice and save, and pressure they bring on their submisssive kids to make a lot of money in a high prestige career. They aren't neccessarily that smart, but they can outwork almost anybody. Even among Indians, Patels are known for their willingness to work grueling hours.

I'd say Patels are an average 100 IQ group (and modestly above the Indian average), but the work ethic is off the charts. Brahmins are smarter, but less money driven and not as laborious.

Jats, who are an agricultural caste without the Patels' mercantile history, are a lot less capable. They work hard and try at school, but their community is not full of doctors and dentists.

Speaking as a Telugu Brahmin Indian American, Patel Motel is dead on. Among young Indian Americans caste is a vague background variable that your parents don't even care about that much (they just want you to marry an Indian American girl with a graduate degree).

Even with keen HBD goggles on there is no obvious pattern, save that *perhaps* there are slightly more South Indian Brahmins in pure math (vs business, programming, medicine). India really does have smart people from many different areas.

The key to understanding India is that the mean IQ is strongly depressed by poor nutrition. Under 1st world economic standards, India would have mean IQ in the low to mid 90s. Not high, but not low.

India also has a high degree of variance in the IQ structure, so it produces lots of smart people.

Indians additionally tend to be industrious and family oriented people, with a strong social climber mentality.

The Indians in the U.S. are a highly select version of high-IQ, educated middle class Indians. Take their technically-oriented education background and IQ, combine with highly controlling family structure, add in work ethic, and throw in desire to be successful........ That's the secret to Indian-American success.

The masses of India aren't too smart, not too dumb.... but they are willing to work/study hard if you give them a chance. India, in many respects, is like China. Lots of non-intellectual and super industrious peasants that will work long hours, take grueling conditions, and sacrifice for their family's future.

Indian success is less to do with IQ than personality, family. and culture. Indians in the U.S. represent a high IQ, educated version of the typical Indian. Sikhs in UK, who are not smart but who are middle class, represent a more typical representation.

Making it into the middle class is not difficult in a first world country, if you avoid social dysfunction. Indians, with their low testosterone level and very controlling families, can do this easily. This is why even Jat Sikhs can do alright in the US and UK, even if they aren't that bright.

If Jats were a little smarter, they'd be like the Patels. I do know a small number of educated and moderately intelligent Jats - and they do very well academically and economically. Beyond what their IQ would indicate.

Indians are the sort of group that can do really well, even with a low IQ, in terms of making good use of opportunities.

Unfortunately, making good use of opportunities is only useful once a group has created opportunities. Creating opportunities is something that takes a high level of IQ and ingenuity, which is something that not nearly enough Indians have.

With the exception of some Brahmin subgroups, I don't think any Indian population has the huge number of really high-IQ, creative people neccessary to ignite India's growth to a first world country. India does, however, have enough high IQ, creative people to at least make some sectors of the country dynamic, such as software.

"Someone should check what percentage of the people who call themselves Mohammad's descendants actually descend from a single male-line ancestor who lived in his time period. This is definitely doable with current technology. I'd imagine that the incentive to falsely claim descent from Mohammad would have been huge over the centuries."

It is odd that they've tested Genghis Khan's descendants but not yet the Holy Prophets.

Now that would be interesting, yet controversial, to test Sayyids from Morocco to Indonesia and check their lineage.

But then again that's going to be devastating to many to rewrite their narrative but then again the truth should never be repressed, whatever the reason.

There is a lot of misconception about the caucasian ancestry of Indians.

Per the Reich paper, Around 10,000 years ago, there were 2 types of Caucasians, CEU ( European ) and ANI ( Ancestral North Indian )

An Anglo-Indian hybrid, with a European parent ( CEU ) and a low caste Indian parent ( 40% ANI ) can easily be distinguished visually from an upper caste Kashmiri Pandit who gets their caucasian ancestry only from ANI.

Anglo-Indian hybrids often have blonde hair and their hair is short and skimpy like Europeans.Blonde hair is a new evolutionary development within the last 10,000 years.

Upper castes with lots of ANI still virtually never have blonde hair and their hair is thick and long. At best their hair looks brownish.

Even otherwise, I have seen thousands of Anglo-Indian hybrids and can 90% of the time visually sort them from more caucasoid upper castes,

How did Patels (Gujaratis) (a) become 50% of the Indian American mix and (b) take over a significant part of the motel industry in the USA? despite not having a reputation as a very high level IQ group within India? The answer might have to do with American immigration policy favoring kin, extreme intra-clan cooperation, cultural memes favoring profit-making (merchant class values), and willingness to make substantial sacrifices for non-next-to-kin.

Even outside the family business, one should expect members of this group to favor relatively high paying professions (e.g., Pharmacist) that are not as intellectually demanding as comparable or even lower paying but high IQ/status professions such as College professor. Among Indian Americans I predict Patels (Gujaratis) are vastly overrepresented in professions where the marginal return on IQ is the highest (such as Pharmacist) and Brahmins (the term as used by rec1man to refer to Brahmins and Brahmin-like castes) to be over-represented in low paying but high IQ professions (professor, scientist). The "poor Brahmin" stereotype is one that is widely recognized within India (thats one way they are different from mercantile groups like the Jews or Marwaris).

Similar reasons might explain why Gujarat is much more economically developed than many other states in India (high level of cooperation, significant smart fraction due to presence of merchant castes in large numbers). Other states may have very high IQ subgroups but these are numerically dominated by the other (much lower IQ) groups.

I've dealt with some Caribbean Indians here in the US. One shouldn't picture V.S. Naipaul while thinking of them, since he's not representative. I'd say that a 90 IQ mean is plausible for them, maybe a couple points higher. It's not an intellectual culture. However, they're very hardworking and have strong families. I can't imagine any of them ever being involved in violent crime (tax evasion, nepotism, corruption - sure). No single mothers either. The incidence of interracial marriages among them seems to be far below that of Chinese- and Korean-Americans, and that's in spite of the fact that a large percentage of Caribbean Indians are Christians. The universalist messages of Islam and Christianity seem to be completely lost on sub-continentals. Not that I blame them for that.

I think the model by Rec1Man was much better. The three highest castes (the 'upper castes'-Brahmin, Warrior, Merchant) make up a very large chunk of India's population and are very smart (I'd say they comprise >20% of India's pop.). India's academic and economic elite is largely derived from these people. As for India's peasant/farmer castes ('OBC's' as they're known in India)-I would imagine the IQ is in the 90's, but malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, etc. all blight that. India's Dalit/Tribal population (~21% of the total) is not very intelligent.

The Indians who were brought to work in Malaysia, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Trinidad/Guyana, etc. were largely derived from India's untouchable castes, with a smaller proportion of backward castes, and a tiny proportion of upper castes. Indians in Malaysia, Fiji, etc. (Britain and France's former tropical colonies) have average IQ's from ~84-88. If India's LEAST intelligent people have IQ's in that range, then I think India's future is fairly bright. The upper castes have very high (100++) IQ's, the peasant/farmer have maybe mid 90's, and the Dalits/Tribals are probably mid-80's, at most.

Perhaps a good way to understand India is to look at Latin America. Though Latin America was invaded by Spanish and Portuguese(rather than by Aryans) and though the new official religion was Christianity, something like an Indian caste system developed and was practiced for centuries.

Dubious. The glaring differenceis the large degree of mixing inSouth America to produce mostly mestizo" individuals, who could to a much greater degree via more intermarriages or even application of wealth, change its place in the structure. Quite unlike the India of classical fixed castes one was born into, died in, and came back as. Its a poor analogy that does little to aid "understanding."

Denis Evans said:"There's another problem with modernity. Elites of old were often ruthless and murderous but they had the courage to impose order on the lower orders. So, the masses were instilled with some values and discipline.

Also dubious. The masses did notnecessarily depend on elites for "values and discipline." IN fact, in some eras and parts of Europe it was often the opposite. It was the masses who pioneered a "values agenda" - shown for example with the rise of a Protestantism in some countries, that actually called for MORE discipline and order, and condemned a reactionary and corrupt Catholic elite. Far from looking to an "elite" to provide "role models", it was the fervently religious Protestant masses who were on the cutting edge of a "values agenda" over the OPPOSITION of elites. One of the key forces in abolishing slavery in the British Empire was a mass one, mostly made up of ordinary Britons, who had to persist over the OPPOSITION of elites, including fat cat merchants, politicians, plantation owners and the elites of the Anglican CHurch, who themselves owned slaves under the church rubric. See Adam Hochchild's "Bury the Chains." for real data, as opposed to dubious fulminations about "elites."

@Denis Evans, regarding equality in Judaism, several hundred Indian jews have returned to India from Israel due to Ashkenazi racism

Here is an excerpt

http://www.indiastar.com/wallia28.htm

Ironically some of the returning Jews met with more discrimination in Israel than they had known in India. The dark-skinned Bene Israel, for example, encountered considerable racial prejudice. Katz writes, "As recently as 1997, an Ashkenazic (European) rabbi in Petah Tiqveh refused to register a marriage between a Bene Israel sabra (native Israeli) and her Ashkenazic groom. The matter caused a brief controversy, but worldwide rabbinic opinion was virtually universal in support of the young woman. The hard-line rabbi was suitably castigated and the marriage was celebrated . . .

As an Indian and a Bengali Brahmin myself I can tell you a few things that contradict your sorting severely :

1 ) The "Thakur" sorting is misleading. Thakurs are also a group of bengali brahmins who have been hugely successful. Rabindranath Tagore, who was a Thakur, counts among the few nobel laureates of India and they have been extremely influential in all aspects of Bengali culture and society.

2 ) Marwaris should be equal to Brahmins, but not above them. The average Marwari is very shrewd in terms of business, kind of Jewish, or so runs the stereotype. They have been immensely successful to such a huge degree that their high ranking is justified, but at the same time most Indians who regularly interact with both brahmins and marwaris would disagree with you putting them above the brahmins.

Now [ take with a grain of salt ] from my own personal experience at academics the Marwaris are not so dominant in academics either. Also, Kayasthas and Brahmins dominate the academic rankings in Bengal, which brings me to my next point :

3) Kayasthas are far too low. As I have said before, the Kayasthas are at least at par with most Brahmins, [the Brahma Kayasthas , who are the major Kayastha group]. The size of the number of eminent people from the community just screams for a better ranking. I'd put them equally with the Bengali Brahmin - from personal experience as a Bengali Brahmin the Kayasthas are cognitively and socially as well as economically and academically highly competitive with the Brahmins.

Very interesting. Andy seems to know a lot about the subject, but I would surmise that he is just passing along the folklore of his particular caste--which I would judge to be Saraswat Brahman. The first Indian anonymous seems to have more facts at his disposal but perhaps a bias in favor of Tamil-speaking Brahmans.

I like the suggestion of combing through the names of those who passed the IIT and IIM exams. If caste can be accurately inferred by surname or if such information is otherwise available, it might be possible to make an accurate estimate of the mean IQ of each caste using the methods of La Griffe Du Lion.

I am in favor of high IQ immigration to the United States, but I think that the Chinese might be a better bet. The fact that they marry outside their group so readily means that they will never become a hostile elite as the Jews have always done; and their strong work ethic insures that even the less intelligent among them are likely to become productive, taxpaying citizens.

South Indian Brahmins are smarter, but Patels are harder working and more into social climbing. SIBs become physicists and software entreprenuers, while Patels want their kids to get into dental school and make $$$.

"My guess, based on anecdotal data only, is that about half of InAms are Gujaratis, and the vast, vast majority are not Brahmins, but rather traditionally merchants. I'm a partner in a medical practice of about 35 total partners. Of these, four are Gujaratis (3 Patels + 1 Shah) and one is Bengali (Roy). I think Roy might be a Brahmin, but the rest of us aren't, and there are no South Indians among us."

This is prolly true, but I think importance of Brahmin or Brahminism is cultural or role-modelistic than demographic. Most successful Indians aren't of Brahmin background, but the long existence of the Brahmanic system inspired even non-Brahmins to respect and value 'higher things'--to want to be like Brahmins.In today's India, Brahmanism has been secularized and modernized. Brahmins used to be the priest class, but today's Brahmins are the high officials, scientists, intellectuals, and such folks. The new elites may or may not be of Brahmanic background, but the respect(and desire)for higher social status has roots in Brahmanic tradition. And to the extent that Brahmin priests were considered to possess the highest knowlege, such perception(and awe) imparted a cultural view that the educated elites have special knowledge worthy of reverence. There's a difference between seeing the elites as rich and powerful and seeing them as not only rich and powerful but wise and special. I'll bet most Latin masses see their elites as stinking rich good-for-nothings. But in some societies, elites are revered(than merely resented). The masses may revere their king, as in Thailand. But in some societies, elites were respected for their special, sacred, or higher knowledge(as possessors of wisdom). Chinese had such view toward the mandarin class.

Just as most Indians are not of Brahmanic background, most Japanese are not of samurai background--since Samurai constituted only 5% of traditional Japan. But as Japan modernized, the samurai ideal became a kind of model of modern Japan(even as the samurai as a caste was extinguished). Even sons of peasants conscripted into the Japanese military came to think in a samuraistic way. And when Japan lost the war, the sararimen--salary men--had a kind of samurai mentality of total dedication and commitment to their company--which became like the new clan. So, neo-Brahmins don't have to be of Brahmin background. The modern Brahmurai of India can be of any background. He could even come from lower castes. But as long as he cherishes and earns a highly prized position in new India, he's carrying on the long tradition of Brahmanism.

Same with Rabbinism among Jews. Most Jews were not Rabbis, but Jewish culture and society were centered around Rabbis. Thus, even Jewish merchants looked to Rabbis for widsom and advice. They wished for their sons to become Rabbis or their daughters to marry Rabbis. Jews loved money but also respected knowledge too. In the modern world, knowledge and money have essentially become one, especially with those in finance, high-tech, medicine, and law making the most money. So, even though most Jews are not literally Rabbis or of Rabbi background, the rabbinical mindset--love/respect of knowlege--has profoundly affected ALL Jews.

So, you don't have to literally be something to be profoundly affected by it. Though most Japanese were not samurai, samurai culture and values have had an impact on all Japanese. On a negative note, though most Hispanics are not black, they seem to have been profoundly impacted by ghetto black culture. Some people look upward for inspiration, some people look down. But then, our pop culture seems to elevate what is most base.

"Denis Evans,Have you ever actually lived in Britain?From the contents of your comment I have the hardest time believing that you'ce ever set foot here.You only have the most 'cartoon' understanding of British life, for example you seem completely ignorant of the fact that Britain is THE home of class warfare and class hatred."

In India, the tech capital is in Bangalore/Hyderabad in the predominately Dravidian southern part of the country. The south is more literate and prosperous than the north, where Aryan ancestry is higher.

Upper castes, for the most part, look like lower castes. Neither high nor low castes are caucasian, in the European sense.

The most Aryan looking people are actually in Pakistan, which is worse off than India. They also are in Kashmir, which is poor, and Punjab, which is a mediocre state by the standards of India. Even then, the Aryan looking Indians are still pretty dark.

There is no relationship between wealth and caucasian ancestry in India. Just ask Razib.

Actually, I was aware of that. There are two things I didn't mention, although I guess I should have:

1) Upper-caste Dravidians are roughly equal in IQ to upper-caste Aryans. There is no relation between language group and IQ, or language group and whether they're Caucasoid or not. And Caucasoid is a racial group, with no relation to skin tone. Europeans and Sri Lankans are both largely Caucasoid, but their skin tones are polar opposites. And there are non-Aryan Europeans who do not suffer from low IQ: the Finns, Basques, Hungarians, and Georgians for starters (and Aryan ones who do... such as Gypsies and Albanians).

2) Muslims, on the other hand, tend to have lower IQs because of the dysgenic and pro-inbreeding effects of Islam on a country's population. Muslim influence was greatest in the northwest (Pakistan) and northeast (Bengal). The south, on the other hand, had quite a bit of Christian influence. For example, Indian Catholics, who are concentrated on the Malabar coast from Goa down to Kerala, tend to have Portuguese surnames despite having no Portuguese ancestry themselves.

@Anon wrote - Since IITs seem to be held up here as an example of the Indian cognitive elite. Here's an extreme example of a poor kid who score top 500 in the national IIT entrance exam.--

The Bihar super 30 program run by a brahmin teacher, does 3 levels of IQ screening followed by a 2 year intensive coaching program for 30 low caste kids and they all pass the IIT exam - Whereas no black kid has the IQ to enter pure-merit places like cal-tech.

This brings me to my next point, that even Dalits with nutrition, are no worse than Afro-Americans and 85IQ is an absolute floor for India. And the Indian IQ in Fiji is about 85, with a mostly low caste blend.

@Bob,the jewish college rate of 59% comes from the 2008 pew report vs Hindu college rate of 74%

http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons

It so happened that a lot of Ashkenazi jews who were in western europe or US did get nobels, but they were piggy-backing on white WASP gentile societal infrastructure, but the Ashkenazi jews in eastern europe without the benefits of the WASP infrastucture did not have any achievements.

The first asiatic to win a science Nobel in 1930, was CV,Raman, an Iyer Brahmin, working in a shitty college in Kolkata.

Arthur Hu, has a url =

http://www.arthurhu.com/index/overrep.htm

Asians vs Jews vs Chinese vs. IndiansIf we set Jewish representation at 1.0, the Chinese are better in some numbers, but only the Asian Indians are consistently better in almost every categor.

( and he is using Indian numbers including 50% non-upper caste )

--

Here is another sanity check.

The National Merit Semifinalists for 2010 was published a few months ago

In 1993, Asian Indians ( only 50% upper caste ) were 0.3% of the US population, and the kids born in 1993, won about 6% of national merit scholarships, this is a 20X over-representation, check the jewish names, I bet they dont have a 20X, most likely a 3X over-representation.

In general, educated Indian-Americans of all castes and languages strike me as fairly bright - as do their children. There might be IQ differences, but they aren't that apparent. Perhaps some of the SOuth Indian Brahmin subcastes are somewhat smarter, but economic success is similar across castes and languages.

The less educated Indian-Americans (ie Carribeans, Fijians, Jats) don't seem particularly intellectual, but they work hard and have the typical domineering Indian family structure. Their IQ is high enough to make good use of society's opportunities, but not high enough to make any outstanding contributions or achievements. So they make it into the middle class or at least the working class.

I do think America has benefited quite a bit from more selective educated immigration from India, but the less educated Indian immigrants probably don't contribute (or take) much from the society.

Indians are a pretty low testosterone group. This has its advantages. Low T people do well in school, don't rebel, stay monogamous, don't take stupid risks, and end up as middle class working stiffs.

The mean IQ, and work ethic, of the masses is high enough for India to become a decent middle income country, but maybe not quite first world. There are also enough smart people to create dynamic companies, a high tech industry, and sophisicated weapons. Maybe it won't be Japan or the US, but India should do just fine and will likely will get by.

There is no consensus on which groups are "upper" or "lower" castes. For example, Jats consider themselves upper caste, but they're technically classified as Shudras, who are low caste.

The reality is that everyone thinks they are upper caste. It can be said that Brahmins are upper caste, but that's about it.

Plenty of self-described upper castes are poor too - and many middle castes, like Patels, are well to do. Many lower castes are benefiting from affirmative action and land reform and are now coming up.

A few castes are likely a lot smarter/dumber than the average, but I'd bet most castes have similar means. Also, a lot of the socioeconomic differences are likely a product of discrimination and unequal opportunities, rather than inability.

Sure a group like SIBs are very well represented as intellectuals, but most upper castes are not particulary smart or regarded as intellectual.

India is an immensely complicated place, but I'm not sure that caste matters as much as people think.

Some people here don't seem to understand how much selective pressures matter in a caste system.

Even if there is no merit behind the original division in a caste system the differing selection pressures within the caste will ensure people will start adapting eventually.

One could quite conceivably see IQ differences after a millennium where none existed before. Askenazi Jews where basically this except they perhaps had a extra boost in the form of those not fitting in converting to Christianity.

Some people look upward for inspiration, some people look down. But then, our pop culture seems to elevate what is most base.

I find this quite interesting. It is a shame it is difficult to quantify the differences between historical societies in terms of historical inegalitarianism and social mobility, because I think a model based on these might help predict the level of interest in "high status" jobs above and beyond IQ ratings. All the societies you talk about seem marked by high inequalities in status yet also a high degree of social mobility. I think the confound to this, of course, would be societies where low status people can develop a counter cultural identity, as in, to a admittedly rather low degree (there's still lots of elite emulation in them), African Americans since probably the mid 20th century (at least).

Per the Reich paper, Around 10,000 years ago, there were 2 types of Caucasians, CEU ( European ) and ANI ( Ancestral North Indian )

A couple of caveats to this.

Firstly, CEU was not in existance 10,000 years ago - it is simply one modern reference population Reich's paper used.

Also ANI is merely a theoretical population and is modelled as one population because it is more parsimonious. It is possible it existed in the fashion that you describe (and that would be more parsimonious in the absence of any kind of archaeological evidence), but I think more likely is that it is an abstraction for multiple waves into India, which have never really ceased ("waves" out of Indian also likely have existed, but have been smaller in effect). Razib Khan has some stuff on this.

I don't see any major problems with the rest of your post, although I have to say I don't really understand why people in the Steveosphere see fit to give random values to things like IQ or ancestry when they have no clue what those things actually are - you may as well just say high or low if you don't actually have any evidence.

I would dearly love to do a name survey on the National Merit Semi-Finalists list to figure out, on a per-capita basis, Indian ( 50% upper caste, 50% middle caste ), Orientals and Jews.

Steve did notice that there were much fewer jews on the list than would be expected on their claimed IQ

IMHO, jews are very much like Marwaris, financial wheeler dealers primarily and only to a lesser extent,into science.This explains their billionaires and still their median income is slightly less than Hindus.

And yes, the Marwaris do outcompete the Jews as when the Marwari Jains took over the diamond polishing business from the Jews in Antwerp.Could one say that Marwari Jains have better IQ than jews.

Jews also get an affirmative action breakThey are classified as whites and compete with dumber Euros than with Indians and Orientals

Per Espenshade, to get into the Ivy league colleges, blacks need 1150, hispanics 1250, whites 1400 and Asians ( Indians and Oriental ) 1550,Jews just need to score 1400, since they are classified as whites.

(I notice that there is no number so high that some people will not believe it is the mean Jewish IQ. If I said that the mean Jewish IQ is 133, I'm sure there are people here credulous enough to believe it.)

The Indians in the U.S. are a highly select version of high-IQ, educated middle class Indians. Take their technically-oriented education background and IQ, combine with highly controlling family structure, add in work ethic, and throw in desire to be successful........ That's the secret to Indian-American success.

You forgot to mention the fact that Indians in the US are a government protected "minority" with all the legal advantages which this entails.

This is prolly true, but I think importance of Brahmin or Brahminism is cultural or role-modelistic than demographic. Most successful Indians aren't of Brahmin background, but the long existence of the Brahmanic system inspired even non-Brahmins to respect and value 'higher things'--to want to be like Brahmins.

Wow, what an insightful comment! I've always wondered why academic success was revered in India. You could walk into any Mumbai shantytown and announce, "My friend here studies at IIT" and the reactions would be respect and awe. People would whisper to their friends about the guy from IIT and soon the whole village would be buzzing.

You walk into Compton and announce, "My friend here studies at MIT" and he'd probably get robbed. While the reaction in Appalachia would probably not be as... dangerous... it would not inspire the same deep respect as among the lower classes of India.

I have always wondered why intelligence was held in such high regard in India. Brahminism as an ideal, as you put it, makes a lot of sense.

"How did Patels (Gujaratis) (a) become 50% of the Indian American mix and (b) take over a significant part of the motel industry in the USA? despite not having a reputation as a very high level IQ group within India?"

Peter Brimelow wrote about that a few years ago on vdare (I believe that Steve did too, but can't find the article). Basically, they used affirmative action preferences and financing courtesy of the US government arranged by a Jew, Michael A. Leven, President of U.S. Franchise Systems, Inc.

Look how badly the famed Indian Institute of Technology do in these competitions.Computer programming seems to have become a contest between Eastern European Slavs and the Chinese. Also observe how the 5 million strong White Africans of South Africa dominate millions of low I.Q. Blacks and medium I.Q. Arab-Berbers in these competitions.Also check the International Olympiad in Informaticshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics

Aryan and Dravidian are not relevant terms for racially distinguishing North and South Indians. All Indians are a mixture between the two groups.

For South Indians, the ancestry is likely almost all Dravidian. For North Indians, ancestry is predominately Dravidian, but there's some Aryan influence. To a Westerner, NIS and SIs look almost identical, so don't obsess too much. The main distinguishing feature between north and south is language. Race really isn't an issue. Yes, southies are darker than northerners, but they do come from the same race.

Aryans aren't white either. The present day population of Afghanistan is descended from the Aryans.

"'Every town in southwest Germany could tell stories of rape by black soldiers', which 'no different to the Russian practice of systematic rape,'" according to historian Götz Aly.

Most of us know "Aryan" refers to a language group. Whatever extent it refers to genetic makeup will depend on, well, genes. Degrees of relatedness. While Finns and Hungarians speak non-Aryan languages, and sometimes much is made of Finns' "differentness", this is more handed down habit and culture. People descended from Norwegians and Finns, living in Minnesota, don't differ in looks or average IQ. People descended from Irish and English, living in New York, don't have irrefutable, singular looks separating one from the other, and despite Lynn's Irish IQ data, the Irish in America do not suffer from below average IQ. I find the term "Caucasoid" useful because it covers a phenotype common from northern Europe to India, yet differing in color. It conveys attributes that no other word can convey. But it is not synonomous with "white" or with "Aryan." We know this. Europeans all fall within a certain IQ span (on average) because they just do. It is in the genes, whether they are in Europe, America or Australia, whether you call them "Aryan" or "Hungarian." Gypsies speak an Aryan language. They do not share the same degree of genetic distance to Europeans that white Europeans share among themselves. This is true of Indians-Indians vary in color, yet have a certain unifiying genetic profile. Hence, bone marrow drives among South Asians; bone marrow drives among Jews; among blacks; among European gentiles, etc. etc.

"Jat Sikhs - Nikki Haley - are famous for being dumb and if a Jat Sikh can outshine most of the whites in NC, it does reflect poorly on NC."

oh give me a break. She's a politician. Politicians don't have to "outshine" anybody. Their ego propels them, they make themselves useful, and their influential contacts keep them in the air. The higher they go, the less they need to have any real credentials providing the media and the powers-that-be support them for often arcane reasons, as we have seen in the past three presidential elections.Politicians of any intellectual brillians are extremely rare.

It's interesting how nobody here has mentioned India's recent problems with the Commonwealth Games which showed up its organisational shortcomings relative to China. India may be doing well in business and academia (probably in part because its elites all speak English)but is miles behind China in terms of industy and infrastructure building.

Another big problem India faces is having to to get hold of inceasingly expensive raw materials like oil when other industrialising countries like China have already acquired much greater reserves of capital.

@Anon wrote - I've heard that in India Islam disproportionally attracted lower caste converts because unlike Hinduism it says that all men are essentially equal under God.--

99% of Dalits did not convertEven now, 90% of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh are Dalits, who remain Hindu despite oppression.

Most Indian muslims are urban artisan castes and butchers who were regarded as sinful in Hinduism-Jainism-Buddhism

Another set was those who converted to save their lands- Benazir Bhutto was a Vadera Rajput landlord.

Another set was renegade upper castes who converted in exchange for a fake Syed lineage, so that they could remain upper-caste.Thats why South Asian has tens of millions of Syeds, who dont really descend from the prophet.

A study of 770 Jewish students attending public high schools in Philadelphia found that their average score on the Otis IQ test was 115.

2) A study of over 1200 students attending all-day Hebrew schools in America found that their average IQ was over 118.

3) A study of schoolchildren in London in the late 1920s found that, after discounting for the fathers’ occupational backgrounds, Jewish children outscored the others by about 9 points. (Without such discounting, the differencebetween the two groups would have been even larger.)

4) A large study of a representative sample of children in Scotland found that the average IQ of the Jewish children was 118.

5) A study of 400 children in Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms) found that their average IQ was about 117.

"White Irish had no police state in the US, but their crime rates int he 19th century were equal to or exceed black crime rates of today (Sowell 1981). So spare us yet another dubious "race" comparison unless you are willing to put it all on the table."

"White Irish?" My goodness. The aforegoing missive made me feel like I was back in college. Weren't you in the "When the Irish weren't white" crowd? You know, that Ignatiev group? You don't fool us anymore. At least try a few stats.

Main Irish crimes in 19th century America were drunkeness and brawling. Rape was rarely perpetrated by Irishmen, a well known fact often attributed to sexual represesion. "Erin's daughters in America" Hasia Diner, 1983.) They did riot during the Civil War and in Union face-offs. Those were serious crimes in those days. Murder occurred but nowhere near today's rates. The degree of violent crime stalking America's cities was unimaginable in those days, though within the confines of their own neighborhoods, it was nasty. Murder, rape and vile harrassment are both feared by everybody who avoids those "bad areas" that make up much of what used to be great and fairly safe (before the 60s)cities.Ireland itself was known for being law abiding in the 19th century--more so than England according to travelers. In the cities of America, the worst of the low-life was behind the larger part of them by the third generation, with little in the way of welfare or affirmative action.

As for the Germans perpetrating the "greatest genocide the world has ever known" -- try again on that one too. I believe even mainstream media now admits that the deaths at Auswitch numbered about a million and half, not the four million they were claiming for years, which would seem to require a recalculation of the total in my estimation. Stalin killed more. Tameralane and his tower of a million skulls in Central Asia a thousand years ago was probably more relatively murderous. Mao killed more. Pol Pot killed more. And special mention must go to the Zimbabwean Hutus who possibly killed more per square foot than any of the above, given the level of their technology and the short time it took.The cities survived Irish criminality. The Irish built their own schools and churches. Criminality did not define and dominate the entire ethnic group. The Irish did eventually assimilate and contributed to the whole, with little in the way of welfare or affirmative action. They have hardly been a lasting threat to urban civilization. Meanwhile, our cities today.....

There are a large concentration of Indians in Toronto and Vancouver, from more middle income and modestly educated background. They're doing alright and the kids perform fine (they're getting into some trouble too), but they aren't leaving anybody in the dust either. The Punjabis and Tamils, two large Indian ethnic groups from commoner backgrounds, aren't known for being too intellectual, but are hungry and industrious.

If they are any indication of India's potential, it seems that the proportion of really smart people in India is not super huge, even if the absolute number of high IQ is sizable. On the positive side, it would seem that the average India is smart enough to do a semi-skilled industrial or lower level office job.

Jats are supposed to be dumb, but partly it's because they drink too much and have crazy bad tempers. When you look at their success within India, I can't believe they're as foolish as people make them out to be.

In Vancouver BC, there are a large concentration of Jat Sikhs. They're working to middle class and do lots of blue collar and construction jobs. Some own small businesses. Their kids generally don't go to college or do much beyond high school, except maybe CC. They live in super huge mansions that they afford by putting 3 families under one roof, in the Indian extended family style. They're not at all intellectual. There are a lot of problems with violence, drugs, and alcohol - yet the prosperity is undeniable too.

A Jat in Vancouver with no college degree can find a bride easily.

I think they demonstrate that commoner Indians can do just fine, even with a lower mean IQ, because of the good work ethic, desire for material success/status, and strong/controlled family structure. In the UK, Sikhs have a slightly lower individual income than whites.

Check out any investment bank or law firm. A lot of the entry level candiates are Indian-American youth. Check out the residency list for any university hospital - 10-12 percent Indian-American. Check out pharmacy and dentistry, or the big accounting firms, or the MBA and engineering programs (mostly FOBs and foreign students though), or private equity groups. 2nd generation Indians, and more especially 1st generation, are really outdoing everyone..... Except maybe Jews, who are less represented than IAs in many of these areas, but who are better at finance/law/business/leadership and get a lot of the really lucrative top positions in companies.

Indians have a higher median income than Jews, but Jews are better represented in the really high income range.

India's government doesn't run well because a lot of dumb people get in through affirmative action for "scheduled" castes. Also because chaos is accepted as a way of life, so authoritarian government is impossible. If India had the ability to put together a meritocratic and ruthlessly powerful/decisive bueracracy, India would likely be closer to attaining China's level of wealth.

"@Bob What are the achievements of Jews prior to 1850 - noneWhat are the achievements of non-Ashkenazi jews post 1850 - noneAshkenazi achievement is post 1850 or even post 1900.Entire south east asia, was peacefully civilized from India,and took up Indian alphabets peacefully, Tagalog in Philipines is written in Indian alphabetentire east asia took up Indian religion peacefully. The Buddha was not oriental, he was an Indian."

It's Indian supremacist comments like these that make people hate you, rec1man. You like to claim that Brahmins are so much smarter than Jews and Europeans and yet all you can do is point to tests. You ignore the fact that Brahmins, despite their vast numbers, haven't accomplished much in THOUSANDS of years. And if you think South East Asia was "civilized" before European colonialism then you are sadly mistaken. "Entire east asia" did not take up Buddhism, and where it was followed, it resembled less of what you have found in India at the time. You are insufferable in your arrogance.

Anon wrote - If Upper Caste Indians are much brighter than Whites why is it that in computing competitions they lag behind Northern Europeans and North East Asians?--

Yes the Han and the slavs do the best in these.

However, IIT Madras- home of SIB did as well as Cornell, and that is pretty good. not something an 85IQ population will do.

Several immigrant brahmins have represented the US in the Math Olympiad over the years.In the 2008 US Math olympiad team, there are 2 brahmins, 1 han and 3 whites.http://www.maa.org/news/061608usimo.html

The way to look at it is that the Upper caste right IQ tail is no better than Cornell at math IQ.

Due to assortive mating for generations, each caste has become homogenized or fixated. So IMHO, the SD for each individual caste, is more likely 12, and not 15.And this improves the lower IQ tail , and also limits upper IQ tail.

I wonder how many people have actually had regular and consistent interaction with Indians on a personal or professional level for any length of time.

From my experience, I have found that the majority of them no matter how well credentialed display glaring gaps in cognitive ability. Keep in mind that these were middle aged anglophone elites and not some randomly selected sample.

That so many Indians have posted in this thread completely specious and unsubstantiated racialist bullshit extolling the virtues of their particular caste only serves to reinforce my view that the Indian, while argumentative, are also intellectually lazy and more form than substance.

-----Basically, they used affirmative action preferences and financing courtesy of the US government arranged by a Jew, Michael A. Leven, President of U.S. Franchise Systems, Inc.-----

http://bit.ly/ehN6ny doesn't seem to indicate govt set asides for minorities as a major factor in this particular case (might have played a bigger role in other sectors such as software/body shopping). Mike Leven played a catalyzing role in organizing them (see http://www.allbusiness.com/management/364152-1.html) but if he didn't do it someone else would have. The fact that Patels and not some other caste or nationality made such inroads into the Motel business suggests that their specific values and ability to work long hours more than compensated for lack of high mean IQ or English fluency. Ingroup cooperation and focusing on strengths could compensate for lack of high IQ.

"Even lots of black mullatoes and quadroons have blonde and red hair and this is essentially absent among upper castes, even if they have the same skin tone."

No, actually it's rare. In fact, red and blond hair is even rare among white adults, bottle blonds, you know. You are thinking of celebrities who go to great lengths to dye their hair, or get fake weaves. It's really weird. Beyonce even puts on a fake hairline (lower--blacks have high hairlines) to make it look as if the hair is growing that way naturally. The spokeswoman for long, blond hair is a black woman whose natural hair is quite "African" (seen the "before fame" pics.) Sort of like Pamela Anderson standing in as the model for meditteranean olive skin tones. Except that Pam's tan is at least natural.

@Bob - Do a google image search for "Dalit" (low-caste indians) and you see a lot of people who look more like Australian aborigines than than their high-caste countrymen.--

The lowest tribal castes have 40% ANI ancestry and 60% ASI ancestry

At the other end, Kashmiri pandits have 75% ANI and 25% ASI

ASI is split off from caucasians ( CEU and ANI ) about 30K years ago, ( After the Orientals split off )

The Australoids split off 50K years ago and have Denisova Hominid Admixture.

ASI has same genetic distance to Australoids as Orientals and Caucasians.

No Indian has australoid ancestry

And yes even the Kashmiri Pandits who are 75% ANI ( not European CEU ) dont have blond hair.Whereas lots of black mullatoes and quadroons have blond hair.

However, most whites pay to do tannning to get the skin color of Kashmiri pandits. And white women would die to get the long thick hair of Kashmiri pandit women.

Fact is we dont care whether we are listed as caucasian or not.

If it suits your imagination, call us Australoid, but with a median family income in US of $90k vs $53K for white and a second generation US college rate of 65% vs 30% for white, it is an educational-economic step down to be white.

Do google up Sunny Leone ( Kareena Malhotra ), millions of white men including KKK types download her porn.

http://www.fameregistry.com/details.php?ps=sunny_leone

shows that she ranks #3 in the top 100 porn star downloads

Hmm - she has 30% ASI blood, I bet even KKK will ignore the 30% ASI blood

First level is Science Nobels, Nuke weapons design, Star-wars defense , World Chess championshipsAt this level, it is dominated by Parsees and SIB ( more specifically Iyer-Iyengar )The late Shiva Subramanya an SIB was in charge of Star Wars for the USA.

Next level, I put the Marwari Jains for a very specific reasonThe mathematical concept of zero and infinity was discovered by Jain Mathematicians, and Jains have actually out-competed jews in the diamond business.

Next level, I put in Punjabi Khatris - They are the only non-SIB Indians to win a science Nobel. Many Khatris win Intel science competitions.

Next level. I put in Bengali brahmins who dont have science Nobels

Next level, I put in general purpose North Indian brahmin

So only Khatris and Jains are in the brahmin range

There was a post on Isteve about Jains a few months ago, that in Harvard Medical school, the only Indians to graduate Magna-cum-Laude were Brahmins and Jains.

As we go below Brahmin, I put in elite south Indian castes like Syrian Xtian, Nair, Kamma, Shetty, Tamil Velala, Tamil Chettiar.

A Syrian xtian runs the Indian ballistic missile programSome years ago, A Syrian xtian won the spelling bee.

A Tamil Velala runs the Indian cruise missile programA Tamil Velala won the 2010 Spelling bee.Humpy Koneru, a Kamma is the World Chess #2 for women.IT is run by elite South Indian castes.

The next IQ level below is the elite North Indian castes Here I put Kayastha ahead of the rest followed by banias of all sorts.Kayastha after all is scribeTheir floor IQ is basic literacy.

Next we come to the Landlord castesAgain here the South Indian Reddy Landlord is very heavily into IT,and many have PhDsThe South Indian Vokkaliga landlord caste won the 2009 spelling bee.

Next would be various skilled artisan castes because I feel to create such artwork must involveIQ, even if they have not received formal schooling

Next level is Patel landlord who is somewhat ahead of Jat Sikh landlord. We all know the genre of dumb Sardarji jokes.

At Jat Sikh, we are about the 40th percentile from the top and I dont bother going further below.

What data are the people deriving the percent of upper castes to be 20%? I'm just curious. A brief search on wikipedia reveals that the forward caste population is estimated to be around 36-38%. However, this percentage might include a large number of castes that are not at the mean level of what one would consider upper caste(completely surmising here). Thoughts?

"To a Westerner, NIS and SIs look almost identical, so don't obsess too much. The main distinguishing feature between north and south is language. Race really isn't an issue. Yes, southies are darker than northerners, but they do come from the same race."

Really? The big, hairy, large-nosed, often pale skinned northern Indians are indistinguishable from the nut brown, small-nosed, smooth-skinned Tamils? There's a new one.

Indians are racially closer to caucasians than any of the other major racial groups, but Indians aren't Europeans. The Australoid component seems physically evident in southern and more especially tribal populations, but not really in northerners.

I've met a few Brahmins and they weren't dummies. But the absolute smartest person I've ever met, the kind of person who could effortlessly understand or do anything intellectual, is a Sikh from a middle class family in New Delhi.

My impression of Indians was higher before the H1-B invasion started in 1999. Apparently pulling 160K smart people per year was too much even for a country of 1.6 billion. It was much better when the truly smart ones came for college and stayed.

"And yes, the Marwaris do outcompete the Jews as when the Marwari Jains took over the diamond polishing business from the Jews in Antwerp.Could one say that Marwari Jains have better IQ than jews."

&

"20% upper caste @ 124IQ "

Such baseless tripe can come only from Rec1man. If it doesn't pass the BS test, it must be Rec1man. First, the Jews is Antwerp are primarily orthodox. Second, success in trade is not a function of IQ beyond a certain point. Third, an average IQ of 124 for upper caste Indians is laughable. Truly laughable. None of the Indian subgroups is even close to that. I'd peg the number at close to a 100 +/- 5 points. Rec1man's smoking some good shit.

Steve, seeing this kind of BS from him, you should be much more wary of trusting anything he says in the future.

"You forgot to mention the fact that Indians in the US are a government protected "minority" with all the legal advantages which this entails. "

WTF? The Patels, who presumably benefit from low interest government funds, typically:

a) tap into family funds

b) are equally commercially successful in the UK where they enjoy no such "legal advantages."

"If Upper Caste Indians are much brighter than Whites why is it that in computing competitions they lag behind Northern Europeans and North East Asians?

Computer programming seems to have become a contest between Eastern European Slavs and the Chinese. "

They're not "so much brighter" but they *more than* hold their own against East Asians in Computer Science Research, and lag whites and Jews big time. For the purported cognitive superiority of East Asians, it doesn't translate into shit where it really counts - in research.

You're cherry-picking data here. For a more complete picture you need to see:

1. The ACM doctoral dissertation awards (for the best CS research by a Phd student any given year): 13 Indians won/got an honorable mention versus 4 East Asians.

http://awards.acm.org/doctoral_dissertation/

2. Nevanlinna prize (for "outstanding contributions in Mathematical Aspects of Information Sciences"; awarded once every 4 years along with the Fields Medal): 1 Indian, 0 East Asians. A MUCH MUCH more elite metric than your Informatics Olympiad.

3. Turing Award (THE most prestigious CS award): Legions of Whites/Jews and exactly 1 Indian and 1 East Asian.

4. Papers at the most elite conferences in CS: roughly 15-20% in any given year are from Indians based in America. East Asians are at half the Indian level.

Seriously, in the absence of high-school competitions results, and looking only at original research contributions, East Asians get sort of owned by Whites and Jews, and perform noticeably worse than Indians. Keep this in mind when you start spewing irrelevant BS next time.

ob said... I don't agree with people posting that Indians are all Caucasians.

From what I can tell, India is a mixture of Caucasian invader populations and the Australoid native populations, with some intermediate groups.\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

The concept of "Caucasian" is a dubious one these days. It is a term in dispute not merely on the usual rhetorical grounds but on scientific grounds as well. It is mostly an arbitrary classification, shifting its boundaries and definition depending on who is using it, for what agendas.

The bulk of Indian mtDNA is Haplogroup "M" encompassing some 60-80% of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (Kivisild et al 2003, vanOven and Mayser 2009) - a sharp contrast to the overall mtDNA pattern of white Europeans. The lumping of Indians with white Europeans is just an attempt to appropriate superior Indian performance and civilization under a white rubric.

As regards so-called 'Aryan" invasions creating different race hierarchies in India, this is debunked by modern DNA which shows low and high caste groups to share the same genetic heritage, undercutting 'Aryanist' fantasies.QUOTE:

"Taken together, these results show that Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene."

Basically, 'caste' was introduced by the Aryan invaders of India 3000 years ago as a means of preserving their genetics from what they thought of as 'contamination' from the indigenous peoples of India whom the held in contempt - both in terms of actual physical appearance, and in terms of customs/behaviour. The Aryans were smart.By giving 'caste' the sanction of religion they ensured what was originally pure racial discrimation became deeply ingrained and fanatically observed.

India does have variation in its population, but on a lot of traits (apperance, martial ability, IQ, behavior) the various caste and regional groups are pretty similar to each other.

On the IQ issue, I think variation within castes is more significan than variation among castes.

A lot of South Indian Brahmins are poor and uneducated. Caste quotas against them play a role, but I don't think they are significantly smarter on average. They might be a little smarter, so there's a definite advantage at the right end of the bell curve....... but the typical Brahmin is not wealthy or educated.

To put it quite simply, IQ doesn't explain poor Indian performance overall. Even if India had 1 billion people @ 85 Median and 15 IQ SD, that's 20 million people at roughly 115 IQ, more than the entire ashkenazim population. And in truth, the SD is higher, maybe so is the median. The high IQ elite is more than sufficient. What's lacking is financial stability to pursue research instead of grinding out long hours at office for money, nutrition, infrastructure, etc. - exactly the factors which led to good Jew performance in the U.S. moreso than their homeland.

IIT alumni again are mostly in IIT to earn money , not a nobel. India is a poor nation and money matters. That is why they lag the others in terms of research, etc.

"If it suits your imagination, call us Australoid, but with a median family income in US of $90k vs $53K for white and a second generation US college rate of 65% vs 30% for white, it is an educational-economic step down to be white."

"Anglo-Indian hybrids often have blonde hair and their hair is short and skimpy like Europeans.Blonde hair is a new evolutionary development within the last 10,000 years."

Blond hair is not popular where it does not exist naturally. Good thing too, after a look at some of the "black and mulatto" red-haired and blonde celebrities. An Indian lady of my acquaintance straightens her hair and says many Indians do so. I was quite surprised as I thought Indian hair was naturally arrow straight. Had them mixed up with American Indians I guess. The Japanese were also obsessed with keeping their hair absolutely straight. I recall a Japanese, I think it might have been Yoko Ono but I'm not sure, who said her family was ashamed of her curly hair and straightening it was a religious rite. They also didn't like brownish glints.

The best hair I have ever seen -- and from which the most expensive wigs are made -- has been in Italy on Italians, whatever shade of hair color, even the blondes. Gleeming, no frayed ends, gorgeous color, thick without being of the "you could put it on a leash a walk it" variety. Maybe it's the olive oil. Italians in this country are not as blessed.Euro hair, however, is indeed "skimpier" on average than Indian certainly, and balding is common.But Euro hair is "short?" That's a style, not a genetic prescription. Hair-fact-flash: The straighter the hair the longer it grows. Long hair has often been in style in Europe in the past. There were seven American sisters during the 1900s who advertised a shampoo--all had brown or reddish hair, extremely thick, rippling down to their behinds, or their knees in a couple of them. That was the style.

I always thought my Persian friends' babies were especially cute because they had a cap of hair and dark eyebrows against pale skin when they were born. But so did my Irish friend. My Irish friend is "black" Irish -- meaning very dark hair -- and her hair is very thick and coarse, but nicely shiney. So thick she has to thin it. Such thick hair is common among the Irish regardless of color.

Sub-Saharan black Africans actually have very fine, fragile hair but the follicules are on a slant. Their hair grows slowly as does all curly hair. Theirs is super curly. Dark hair in the other races than African is generally thicker in texture.

Of course, before 1965 indian immigration to the USA was banned, due to the fact all immigration to the USA was race-based in those days and American jurists decided that Indians were not to be included as a 'White' subgroup (however many Arabs were included as 'White). Canada, believe it or not had a similar stipulation and Australia openly and explicitly banned Indians. Many would argue that America's greatest days lay in the decades pre-1965.Here was the period in which the USA unchallengeably ruled the roost, this was the time of the great scientific and technological breakthroughs, the Apollo program, computers, civil engineering, electronics, medicine, aircraft etc and for all practical purposes there wasn't a single Indian on US soil!

"What are the achievements of Jews prior to 1850 - noneWhat are the achievements of non-Ashkenazi jews post 1850 - noneAshkenazi achievement is post 1850 or even post 1900."

Does this guy know any European history? The philosopher Spinoza? The Rothschilds? Composer Mendelsohn? British PM Disraeli, advisor to Queen Victoria? All got their start before 1850. That's just scratching the surface. The reason there were few Jews involved in the larger culture before 1850, was because even the hold-out countries like Russia finally allowed Jewish entrance into universities and professions in the later 1900s. In many parts of Europe they already had been quite involved. Austria went "secular" in the later 1700s. Jews began returning to England in the late 1600s (they'd been expelled in the middle ages.) Napoleon wasn't prejudiced. If Jews professed loyalty to France, they were French as far as he was concerned. Jews were involved in the slave trade in a major way--the ships they owned and the crews they employed (even the crews were heavily Jewish) are on record, included Jews from England, Spain, Holland and Portugal, and used to be cited by Jews themselves before that topic was suppressed. The first synagogue in the U.S. was in Rhode Island, a prominent slave trading port. Jews owned slaves in slave-owning states at larger percentages than gentile whites. (Even mulattoes and a few blacks owned slaves--I know because they are among my ancestors and I have the records.) Jews have contributed good and bad to the western civ, as have non-Jews. They are neither superhumans nor demons, but something has made them very driven in recent centuries, and so they sometimes seem larger than life, as a group.

rec1man (posting as anon here; he also has a big IQ thread at india-forums) has his numbers off in the regression to the mean from father to son. The best estimates of the IQ correlation between fathers and sons (across generation) in the population are around 0.35; So for fathers who are 3 SDs above the mean (say 145 IQ) the mean IQ of sons would be 100 + 3*0.35*15 = 116 which is a substantial (65%) regression to the mean but not as large as rec1man has repeatedly asserted (80%) as that implies an inter-generational IQ coefficient of only 0.2 which is far too low.

Although rec1man has put forward some hypotheses regarding distinct Indian sub-populations and various other aspects (islamic and nutritional penalties), he goes offtrack by making absurd inferences regarding IQ of orthodox Jews and Indians (Jains) based on very specific events in the diamond trade.

Finally another anon commenter on this thread remarks that many Indian professionals in the US while argumentative, are intellectually incurious. In my opinion, this is unremarkable and simply reflects the complete lack of a liberal education as may be obtained in the better American universities. There are very few, if any, Indian schools of learning that provide a quality liberal education (but several that provide quality technical/professional education) in the arts and even the sciences (science and math degrees are considered low prestige in India as opposed to Engg and Medicine). This is clearly reflected in the (lack of) quality Indian journalism. For this reason, second-generation Indian Americans, despite any regression to the mean, are verbally and intellectually on par with their peers, compared to their parents. There are some first-generation Indians who are exceptions but, almost always, have been educated in America or England at some point. Fareed Zakaria (Yale and Harvard) is an extreme example. In the colonial era, there were a few pockets of high quality liberal education within India (in Madras and Calcutta); those rapidly deteriorated post-independence, thanks to economic factors and large scale affirmative action.

There is a blindspot in the HBD-sphere. If Performance (real-world outcomes) depends on the multiplicative product of Ability (IQ) and Motivation (culture), then its perfectly possible for high IQ groups to under-perform and lower IQ groups to over-perform. If we add in-group cooperation to the mix, then performance clearly also depends on who you know and what they are willing to do for you. Would any smart Indian kid like Fareed Zakaria get into Yale if he lacked the equivalent parental connections? This who-you-know factor becomes massive if the criteria are ambiguous (e.g., getting a break in Bollywood). One place where such in-group cooperation among Indians has "worked" is within Silicon valley. See http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/21/a-fix-for-discrimination-follow-the-indian-trails/ Even so, I think, on average, Indians have lower Testosterone and risk-taking propensities; this may be holding them back in certain areas but could be an advantage in others.

Like the original designers of IQ tests, I think group IQ provides a solid constraint to what the group cannot accomplish but does not have any strong implications for probable group accomplishments. That said, even an originally high IQ group in the absence of civilizational pressures to reinforce high IQ, would via dysgenic fertility gravitate towards idiocracy.

There is a blindspot in the HBD-sphere. If Performance (real-world outcomes) depends on the multiplicative product of Ability (IQ) and Motivation (culture), then its perfectly possible for high IQ groups to under-perform and lower IQ groups to over-perform. If we add in-group cooperation to the mix, then performance clearly also depends on who you know and what they are willing to do for you. Would any smart Indian kid like Fareed Zakaria get into Yale if he lacked the equivalent parental connections? This who-you-know factor becomes massive if the criteria are ambiguous (e.g., getting a break in Bollywood). One place where such in-group cooperation among Indians has "worked" is within Silicon valley. See http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/21/a-fix-for-discrimination-follow-the-indian-trails/ Even so, I think, on average, Indians have lower Testosterone and risk-taking propensities; this may be holding them back in certain areas but could be an advantage in others.

Like the original designers of IQ tests, I think group IQ provides a solid constraint to what the group cannot accomplish but does not have any strong implications for probable group accomplishments. That said, even an originally high IQ group in the absence of civilizational pressures to reinforce high IQ, would via dysgenic fertility gravitate towards idiocracy.

I just wanted to reiterate that according to Wikipedia the forward caste population in India is estimated to be at around 35-38%. These castes are not awarded any seats at universities through reservations/affirmative action. Could anyone with more knowledge about this, explain whether this would be a healthy estimate of castes with around 100 IQ or if it might still include a substantial proportion of people with lower averages?

Mike wrote, "....I met medical outsourcing personnel when I was there who processed US lab tests. They laughed about sending back random results to skin tissue samples etc when I got them drunk."

If you take nothing else from this often silly thread, remember that comment. Sounds absolutely plausible. A valium addict of my acquaintence orders the cheap Indian valium but admits it doesn't do the trick. I once bought cold medicine in an Indian hotel pharmacy that knocked me out wonderfully for the entire 8 hour plane trip to Frankfurt. What I'd give for it, but I'll wager it was a little dangerous.America. What have we done to ourselves.All that being said, my stay in that Indian hotel -- actually an international chain hotel -- in Delhi was phenomenal. Professional staff, desk attendants sharp in their attire (the saris especially; never thought a uniform could look so graceful), several top-notch restaurants and coffee-shops, room service with silver pitchers on ice. Some sort of hot chocolate drink I can't get here, that seemed to have survived from the Raj; clothes cleaned and ironed for a few dollars. Amazing. And with grace and style for a price that would have been reasonable even in the U.S.

A study of 400 children in Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms) found that their average IQ was about 117

Kibutzniks were mainly secular elite Ashkenazi Zionists who wanted to create a new type of society for the Jews and play farmer. WRT sex roles they were often radically egalitarian, they were in-group socialists and very, very sucular.

As a self-selected elite drawn from European Jews, already the elite in the Israeli population, their average IQ, even if 117 is accurate, is not even representative of Ashkenazi Jews.

Reclman: "IQ __ with nutrition...IQ __ with nutrition..." Are you saying the putatively brilliant-ass Brahmins aren't even capable of creating a society that can manage to fulfill a basic human need after a few thousand years? Keep that elite out of my country. I'd rather have fewer witch doctors and decent meals.

An anon said Creating opportunities is something that takes a high level of IQ and ingenuity, which is something that not nearly enough Indians have.

That is exactly the problem with all of the supposedly elite immigrant groups: Given free reign the Indian elite creates India.

"It's not that they hate freedom but fear that freedom might turn the lower masses-and there are plenty in still poor China--into a bunch of permanently corrupt idiots..."

I don't buy the idea that the modern West is a big champion of freedom. It's just propaganda. Is the percentage of the Chinese population that's in jail for saying taboo things really greater than the percentage of the European population that's in jail for saying things that are taboo in Europe? I don't know. Freedom is the ability to pursue self-interest. In a lot of important ways self-interest is represented by ethnocentrism. Well, if you're a member of the majority, I don't think the Chinese or the North Korean state will ever put you in jail for ethnocentrism. In Europe they might.

The modern western idea of freedom seems wholly utilitarian and liberal. It means, "free to be liberal." So, no, not so much free to be ethnocentric, or speak your mind openly, but rather free to sell your inheritance and posterity on the free market. Economic liberty, liberal fascism is obviously okay with western elites.

But your reply doesn't address the quote, which seems true to me. Chinese authorities seem to know that they have to keep a fairly tight lid on things. Lower classes in China seem to go ape over stuff relatively easily. The central government had an anti-riot-forces recruiting drive last year.

I am in favor of high IQ immigration to the United States, but I think that the Chinese might be a better bet. The fact that they marry outside their group so readily means that they will never become a hostile elite as the Jews have always done; and their strong work ethic insures that even the less intelligent among them are likely to become productive, taxpaying citizens.

How much "high IQ immigration" do you favor? What IQ cutoff would you use? How would you determine IQ? How do you propose to handle chain immigration? How would you propose to measure the success of your program? Mitigate liabilities?

There aren't too many Indian "supremacists." Most Indians will defend their state of origin (Punjab, Bengal, Sindh, etc.) and their caste (Brahmind, Jat, Marwari, Kayasth). Beyond that, there isn't much unity among the castes and different regions of Indians. You're not going to find South Indian Brahmins extolling North Indian Sikh Jats.

All these statements about Indians winnning Spelling Bees, Turing Awards, Motel industry, etc. are not based in some common racial pride. It's simply a matter of observation. All of us Indians have seen other Indian caste/language groups flourish... I've seen Patels owning lots of motels, Jats building mansions in Vancouver, and South Indian Brahmins winning all sorts of academic prizes.... I don't belong to any of those groups, but I gotta admit that each one of them is faring decently well. Better than a mean IQ of 81 would suggest.

I have no problem with the idea that Indians are low IQ. Facts are facts. I just don't see the evidence that they could be as dumb as Phillip Rushton says. Even if you look at India's historical accomplishments, it was pretty advanced for a few thouand years. The present day relatve backwardness (in comparison the rest of the world) is not a long standing trend, but an anomaly. Much like China's slip to the bottom was an anomaly.

Personally, I think a low/mid 90s mean IQ, with a high variance, makes sense for Indians. Right now, I think this mean IQ is highly depressed by poor nutritiion, poverty, and infrastructure. As living conditions improve in India, it'd gradually become a semi-prosperous and middle income country, with large intellectual elite. Not Switzerland, but maybe like Portugal.

Rect1man's model, in my view, relies a lot on the assumption that IQ correlates very strong with the success metrics of every caste. It's not an unreasonable model, if you are an IQ determinist...... Personally, I would attribute environment, culture, historical circumstances, and other factors. His methology is not flawed, however, if you are a HBD believer.

If you ask me, I think it'd be nice to live in a world where most groups don't vary that much by IQ.

I know several Indians who made Australia their home during the pre-1965 'White Australia' regime - which was primarily directed at: Chinese! (see Australia's experience with Chinese during the Gold Rush).

Far from 'open and explicit' the Australian policy was administered at the discretion of local officers at the port of entry, where new migrants were subjected to a spelling test.

Physicians are 26 times more likely to be Hindu than the overall U.S. population (5.3 percent of doctors vs. 0.2 percent of nonphysicians). Doctors are seven times more likely to be Jewish (14.1 percent vs. 1.9 percent),

If you look at the same top 50 most-cited who entered law teaching since 1992, you also see that (by my rough count, and judging by likely ethnicity, not by religiosity) 19 are Jews, a group that makes up 2% of the full-time working population

you'll find that 5 of the top 50 are South Asians, though South Asians make up 2/3 of 1% of the population

--I just wanted to reiterate that according to Wikipedia the forward caste population in India is estimated to be at around 35-38%. --

I don't think these numbers have any strong implications for the IQ split or even the economic status. I believe that about 20% of the population have had a history of literacy going back a few centuries and this is the number used by rec1man. Almost everyone but the upper elites (top 1%) have a living memory when even the basics of life (food) couldn't be taken for granted (this includes most Indian Americans.. their parents, grandparents and generations before probably lead a pretty hard life).

Every group wants to be classified as "backward" as that leads them to sharing the affirmative action spoils. In Tamil Nadu almost every group but the Brahmins are in the "backward" category. And the school exams are rigged to favor simple memorization (too many people get near the max score which makes the small distinctions almost random). Brahmins in Tamil Nadu have little to no chance to get into medical/professional colleges that are not based on all-India entrance examination (this is the vast majority of colleges at the state level).

But they can cross state boundaries or even go abroad (if they can afford it) and try their luck elsewhere. There are plenty of Indian students who study Medicine in the erstwhile Soviet Union and now increasingly in China (learning the respective languages.. many Indians have a gift for picking up new languages; this may be related to the ease with which they have entered the software/IT industry). Else they can forgo college and find work in the expanding economy after taking occupational training or even turn into entrepreneurs by necessity.

Regarding dirt/filth etc. Yes, this is true but also realize that the average population density in India is 10 times that of the USA and that corruption is enormous (thanks to diversity among many other things). But changes are in the right direction. For example, you can download textbooks used by the central public school system (in English) from grades 1 to 12 at http://www.ncert.nic.in/NCERTS/textbook/textbook.htm . The educational system is being reformed but everything in India takes time and many of the rank and file in government are not exactly very bright and even if they are, tend not to be very motivated and highly risk averse. So it is a mystery as to how anything gets done at all (the aforesaid texts for example).

I think the current Indian census is supposed to collect caste data for the first time in many decades, perhaps since 1930. Any know about this? I'd like to see someone apply smart fraction theory to explain variance of development across Indian states.

"A lot of South Indian Brahmins are poor and uneducated. Caste quotas against them play a role, but I don't think they are significantly smarter on average. They might be a little smarter, so there's a definite advantage at the right end of the bell curve....... but the typical Brahmin is not wealthy or educated."

Thanks for pointing this out. You can't count on ethnic chauvinists like rec1man to mention this. He would have you believe that all South Indian Brahmins were millionaires with 140+ IQs.

@Anon wrote - Then why are you here and not in your brilliant country?

--

Fact is, upper middle class Indians are no longer immigrating to the west. Using a green card to get a mail order bride from India, is no longer possible, if you are upper middle class. Upper middle class salaries are 50% of US salaries with 10% of the cost of living.

About 50,000 US immigrants from India, have gone back to India

The newer immigrants are more middle-class and lower-middle class and a lower IQ blend.

The Indian govt also offers a H1-B type visa to Europeans, if they have a local job that pays more than $25K. This way they dont displace anyone below upper-middle class.

There are thousands of white families working in India for $25k to $35K ( they are able to save $15k each year ).South India is growing at 11% a year and a $25K job in India with perks is a reasonable option to many in the west who face unemployment.

I visited Chennai, a few months, ago. In the malls, I saw dozens of white teenagers ( non-tourists ) in Indian style dress.

In one of the brahmin colonies, I saw a teenager wearing an orthodox brahmin style sari and riding a bicycle. Women wearing this style of sari are ultra-orthodox middle-aged and never ride bicycles,.

So I took a second look, and hmm seems to be a very fair brahmin, and then it sank in that this was a European teenager

Also there are thousands of Korean expats on H1B type visa, in the Indian auto Industry. Many common people assume they are Nepali or from Assam in north-east India, which has tens of millions of Mongoloid race people,

For those claiming that Indians aren't a Caucasian population, a look at their Y haplogroup variation shows Indians to have far more in common with parts of Europe than with any of Eastern Asia. Their mtDNA is closer to the rest of Eastern Asia than to Europe.

This is what one would expect of a population founded by invading males breeding with native women.

India most reminds me of...Latin America: a large, ancient native population intrebreeding with an invading Caucasian group. Perhaps India is what the USA will look like in 3000 years if technology doesn't intervene.

"For those claiming that Indians aren't a Caucasian population, a look at their Y haplogroup variation shows Indians to have far more in common with parts of Europe than with any of Eastern Asia. Their mtDNA is closer to the rest of Eastern Asia than to Europe.

This is what one would expect of a population founded by invading males breeding with native women.

India most reminds me of...Latin America: a large, ancient native population intrebreeding with an invading Caucasian group. Perhaps India is what the USA will look like in 3000 years if technology doesn't intervene."

Why don't you do some more research before posting your own hasty conclusions from a data sample? Recent evidence indicates that R1A which is the most common Indian Y haplogroup has its most probable origin in India. Similar genetic analyses of the Indian population illustrate that the different castes largely derive from the same sources with little exogenous input. While I don't doubt that there was a linguistic shift in the population due to migration of indo-european speakers thousands of years ago, their genetic imprint is relatively nonexistent.

A parallel case is demonstrated by Turkey where although the population speaks a Turkic language, they are genetically indistinct(apart from the Kurds) from neighboring Greeks and Armenians while sharing little to no affinity with the Mongols with whom their language shares a commonality.

Arguing that India is like Latin America is preposterous in the sense that Indian elites vary from being "wheatish" all the way to being very dark brown/black while the Latin American upper classes are disproportionately of visible european or part-european ancestry. Seriously, it is nigh impossible to determine someone's caste just by looking at them and "wheatish" individuals invariably have darker siblings and cousins.

I find it humorous that commenters label what they deem to be the higher IQ castes as having light skin when it should be plain to see that the average Indian American is probably darker than most Mexican Americans and many are as dark as the darkest Africans.

Furthermore, if Indians are found to be more related to Europeans than Mongoloid populations it is because Indians, Arabs, and Europeans share a closer genetic affinity than all three do to Mongoloid and African Populations. This genetic relatedness did not arise due to an invasion by an exogenous group a la colonialism in Latin America.

"What did the Europeans do in 500 years of colonization of south east asia ?" How about introducing high technology like the railways, telephones, airports, modern ships made of steel and run on coal, auto-mobiles, modern medicine, eradication of diseases to name a few. These inventions including the computer you type on were the creation of the genius of the European mind. Wait! The Europeans namely the British introduced the same in South Asia too. Before their contact with Europeans, Indians with their Brahmins never had railways, auto-mobiles etc....What use were the high IQ Brahmins if they had to wait for a British Mlecha Barbarian to work on Malaria, something which claimed the lives of millions of Indians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_RossHad anybody told the Mughal Emperor or a South Indian Brahmin in 1700 that humans would one day fly or walk on the chand (moon), they would have laughed out wild. But those Europeans did it.

Desi Narine"The lumping of Indians with white Europeans is just an attempt to appropriate superior Indian performance and civilization under a white rubric."

Yeah right!, Whites have too many achievements to do something like that. That is left to the loser races who have their Afro-centrism as a balm for their low self-esteem.

"If Upper Caste Indians are much brighter than Whites why is it that in computing competitions they lag behind Northern Europeans and North East Asians?Not only do the Slavs and the Chinese outcompete the High Caste Indians in computer programming but in the Maths Olympiads too.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_OlympiadChina and Russia are the only nations that have achieved an all-members-gold IMO multiple times (China: 10 times in total, including years 1992, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010; Russia: 2 times in 2002 and 2008).

This is what a tiny group with mean IQ of 115 achieves:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureatesThere is what a billion people with mean IQ of 85 achieves:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_of_IndiaBob forget Ashkenazis, there are more people of German, British or Japanese ancestry winning the Nobel prize in the Sciences than high caste Indians.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_countryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_Nobel_laureates

India is a complicated place.... but let's clarify something things........

1.) India is NOT Latin America. Light is not smarter/richer than dark. Aryan is not more advanced than Dravidian.2.) "Upper" and "lower" caste are pretty arbitrary, depending on who is doing the defining.3.) Lots of middle and low castes have done well in India and abroad. Many have done quite well thanks to caste quotas, which seem to have been utilized by low caste Indians much more effectively than NAMs, suggesting that the caste IQ gap is smaller than the black-white gap.4.) To the extent IQ varies among castes, the mean variation is likely not huge. Though mean variation can mean significant differences on the tails of the bell curve.5.) Indian-Americans are a highly select group, for IQ and education.6.) Less select Indians do about working to middle class in Canada or the UK.7.) Indian IQ potential is likely a lot higher than the given values. Based on data from Indian populations living abroad, low/mid 90s makes sense.8.) Currently, India is severely afflicted by malnutrition, disease, and poor education. So the intellectual potential has not been tapped, yet.9.) Historically, India has had a strong record of civilizational accomplishment (arts, science, astronomy, etc.) and accounted for pretty large fraction of the global economy until a few centuries back. It really punches up there with China.10.) Low IQ people don't develop high tech industries or nuclear weapons. 11.) In India, educated have a tendecy to marry educated. So IQ stratification may have happened to a larger extent than the U.S.12.) Indian laborers in the Carribean and Africa were generally stereotyped as industrious, thrifty, clannish, long term oriented, non-violent, docile, social climbers. These are what you could call K-selected traits and they apply to the masses as much as the elites. However, the elites are a lot smarter and bettr educated.... so the masses can make it into the working middle class, given opportunities, but the elites can make it into the affluent class. Both groups likely overperform their their IQ, much like East Asians overperform.

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